notes on truth

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evening | days of ‘truth’

What’s truth?

Look it up in an unabridged dictionary, which I’m doing below.

I love doing that with auratic (e.g., ‘love’), mystified (e.g., ‘spirit’), and allegedly difficult words (e.g., ‘truth’). It’s a tickle. (That reminds me of my undergraduate professor of ancient philosophy giggling regularly during lectures. He was very elderly, and loved his calling. When the very Christian man died, he had his gigantic library shipped to a mission in central Africa.)

The oldest definition of ‘truth’ is allegedly “1 a archaic : the quality or state of being faithful: fidelity, constancy” “Archaic” is not “obsolete”; the lexicographers use ‘obsolete’ frequently, when apt. I think of “true to form” or “being true” in friendship. Merriam-Webster uses S. T. Coleridge: “…whispering tongues can poison truth…” Pithy. Anyway, think a moment of the consanguinity of fidelity, constancy, being true to form, and faithfulness (as a non-religious notion, simply consanguineous with the others here). Archaic may be far beyond primitive (a basic meaning of ‘archaic’) because the meaning is archetypal, in this case evincing from Old English, akin to Old High German and Old Norse: fidelity, trustiness, faith. Truth in trust, an intimacy of reliability, as if deep need for reliability in life is integral to there being good life. Indeed—in deed. Etymology is anthropology.

reverence for the future

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In Heidegger’s 1975 television interview, he referred the viewer to a specific work, 1964, which is available in the book On Time and Being (1972). He died in May, 1976. Born on a 26th, he died on a 26th, a few months after Hannah Arendt, December, '75.

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What is his sudden look in the last fraction of the last second of the video—a little, very private recoil: embarrassment toward a fatefulness of the word? von Kleist's reverence has been made into an interview object, there and gone, like so much of our talktalktalk?

what is translation?

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The great translator Ralph Manheim (namesake of a coveted award given to translators, the “PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, ” “likened his work...,” says the New York Times obituary, 1992—“likened his work to acting, saying a translator’s challenge was ‘to impersonate his author,’” not to impersonate the author, but to enown the author, “his author,” in the act of translation.

Is this the Act belonging to the translation; or is it the translation belonging to the Act of translating? The latter, of course. The translating is an enowning of the authorship, an intimacy with the authorship that results in a possession by the author (as best one can) of the text at hand. The author may say, in the intimacy of the writing—in gaining the time that is to let go of the writing and, in effect, saying in the Act of releasing the writing into the version of itself that is now:— “This is the text that I’ve become, through which I am for you." That surely seems unduly poetic (if not oblique), but enowning thought is integral to Heidegger’s thinking.

In the intimacy of the writing, the author becomes of his/her text. The text born from the authorship is by the author of the text—the author understanding himself as of this text. The writing is alive in setting forth what is set up “now” as the text of the authorship, by the author who, relative to the text, has become the author of the text.

what is being German, 1934-35?

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What is renewal for "We" who must enown Our region?

“Martin Heidegger’s 1934–1935 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ are considered the most significant among Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin,” blurbs the publisher’s book cover.

Considered by whom? I thought that his post-War lectures were the most important.

things of Appropriating

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Though Heidegger's essay “The Thing" is widely available in English, it's maybe useful to also provide a PDF of it. Also, at the end of this note is a link to a PDF of the entire book (which downloads slower, maybe).

With Heidegger, keep in mind that he can only speak from his time. Television, for example, was barely invented. So, questions of our being are shared and not (like a mirrorplay of identity in difference—being together identity-in-difference). Now, we grow up as if the Internet arose from Nature. What a "Thing"!

He speaks to the future, not to his time, yet from his time calling for futural appropriation.

It's for you to find how potential for focal gathering belongs with you within and among Us now, going on, potentially originary.

environmental engineering

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This posting was mistakenly transferred from the Facebook/Habermas project to here. It belongs and is here.

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Of

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For an Eros of mathematics: So Edward Frenkel prospects. Contrary to him, I don’t prospect that The Universe may be a simulation. I’d love to elaborate (not now, yet...).

I would agree with him (and Leslie Valiant) that continua from mathematical physics into biology and beyond (e.g., human cognition) can be fruitfully modeled (e.g., cognitive computing—a.k.a “AI”). Yet, fulfillment of the Langlands Program (deep-structural homologies between number theory and harmonic analysis—so far beyond my capabilities of comprehension) would leave us still in wonder about the continua of life. They—the high, wondrous prospectors—are far from fruitfully prospecting even the computationality of a regulatory genome in simple life, let alone a neuroscience of such prospecting (e.g., a computational neuroscience of ordinary curiosity). It’ll never happen.