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, nihilism then 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.

autumn 2018

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I’ve given lots of time, the past couple of months, to commenting at news articles, especially New York Times articles and the Washington Post (and other sites, too). I keep a copy of each comment, because I carefully write my comments before posting them.

That has resulted in a large archive of comments (over 50K words, so far) that I’ll love to organize into topic areas someday (or weave into upcoming topics).

The fun continues, exemplified by today’s constitutional law posting.

capsulating a tropography

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News that Google+ is closing down caused me to post the following there (modified now for here):



If you have conceptual interest in individuation, creativity, phenomenality, tropology, literary humanism, conceptuality as such, metaphilosophy, post-logocentric philology, standard topics in theoretical humanities (e.g., value theory, philosophy of mind, cultural psychology, theory of “Truth” [in standard philosophical senses]), pragmatism, bioscience, anthropology, metascience, public policy, historiology, Heidegger, philosophy of education and health care, philosophy of law, Jürgen Habermas, evolutionary theory, political progressivity, community development, good government, planet management (sustainability), S.E.T.I., and enough writerly eccentricity that I risk losing credibility, re: views on all of the above areas, then do stay in touch.



After all, the ultimate meaning of life is to 
have fun.

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summer 2018

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If I regard the commercialism of “social networking” platforms (in the margins and in “pushed” content) in conjunction with the so common frivolity of personal content on them, I feel nausea in the fingers—and feel thankful for solitude.

Habermas as philosopher

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The editor’s introduction to Habermas’ Philosophical Introductions: five approaches to communicative reason (English 2018 / German 2009) indicates how the collection isn’t merely Habermas introducing his career of philosophical work—his career of work as being philosophical. Rather, he is doing so philosophically. 

He is doing philosophical work there, not merely discursive narrative about work that is philosophical in intent. Each part of the book advances Habermas’s especially philosophical sense of his career—a career which has also been theoretical (writing as meta-social theorist) and practical (writing as public intellectual), yet also has been especially philosophical.