Where's Y?
Monday, October 16, 2023
For Harlan Kane — The Heidegger Conundrum
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Monday, April 10, 2017
Heidegger for Passover
From this journal on August 7, 2010 (footnotes added today) —
The title of this post, "Rift Designs," … is taken from Heidegger. From a recent New Yorker review of Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson— "Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms." Following this advice, we find— "Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying and unfolds it3 in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure4 of a manifold showing." — p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993 "Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens." — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" 2. "Christ descending into the abyss" 3. Barrancas of Cuernavaca 4. Combinatorics, Philosophy, Geometry |
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
From a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne —
"Did you never hear of the 'Fountain of Youth'?"
asked Dr. Heidegger, "which Ponce de Leon,
the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two
or three centuries ago?"
"But did Ponce de Leon ever find it?" said
the Widow Wycherly.
"No, answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never
sought it in the right place. The famous
Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is
situated in the southern part of the Floridian
peninsula, not far from Lake Macaco.
Its source is overshadowed by several gigantic
magnolias…."
See also the previous post.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Hofstadter Meets Heidegger
"On Seeing A's and Seeing As" — Hofstadter
"Man redet dann vom Kern der Dinge." — Heidegger
Friday, December 24, 2010
Hollywood vs. Heidegger
The Silver Chalice — Hollywood version and Heidegger version
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Theology for Geeks: Claves Regni Caelorum
Sunday, May 26, 2024
Bullshit Studies: Grounding the Problèmatique
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Seize the “Dia-”
https://www.etymonline.com/word/dia- —
"… before vowels, di-, word-forming element meaning
'through, in different directions, between,' also often
merely intensive, 'thoroughly, entirely,' from Greek
dia 'through; throughout,' probably cognate with bi-
and related to duo 'two' (from PIE root *dwo- 'two')
with a base sense of 'twice.' "
A midrash for Heidegger —
Here "PIE" does not refer to food. It is an acronym
for "Proto-Indo-European."
See as well "Language Animal" in this journal.
Sunday, October 8, 2023
Einführung
Metaphysics for the damned —
From the 1979 film "A Little Romance" —
Reading something you It's just a book. I used to read those too. What is it?
An Introduction to Metaphysics,
School has changed I'm just reading it for fun.
Fun?
Most people think anyone
I don't. But I have to admit
Heidegger.
Heidegger isn't all that hard.
Like, "Why is there something |
… And for the not so damned —
The Source —
https://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/
Heidegger-EinfuhrungMetaphysik.pdf
The actress playing the teen reading Heidegger in the 1979 film
"A Little Romance" was Diane Lane. The film was set in Venice.
Later in Venice . . .
Ben Affleck and Diane Lane at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
premiere of "Hollywoodland" :
An antidote to Hollywoodland . . .
The classic novel Under the Volcano :
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
Friday, March 10, 2023
Hofstadter on Geometry
Monday, February 6, 2023
Interality Studies
You, Xi-lin; Zhang, Peter. "Interality in Heidegger."
The term "interology" is meant as an interventional alternative to traditional Western ontology. The idea is to help shift people's attention and preoccupation from subjects, objects, and entities to the interzones, intervals, voids, constitutive grounds, relational fields, interpellative assemblages, rhizomes, and nothingness that lie between, outside, or beyond the so-called subjects, objects, and entities; from being to nothing, interbeing, and becoming; from self-identicalness to relationality, chance encounters, and new possibilities of life; from "to be" to "and … and … and …" (to borrow Deleuze's language); from the actual to the virtual; and so on. As such, the term wills nothing short of a paradigm shift. Unlike other "logoi," which have their "objects of study," interology studies interality, which is a non-object, a no-thing that in-forms and constitutes the objects and things studied by other logoi. |
Some remarks from this journal on April 1, 2015 —
Manifest O
|
83-06-21 | An invariance of symmetry The diamond theorem on a 4x4x4 cube, and a sketch of the proof. |
83-10-01 | Portrait of O A table of the octahedral group O using the 24 patterns from the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem. |
83-10-16 | Study of O A different way of looking at the octahedral group, using cubes that illustrate the 2x2x2 case of the diamond theorem. |
84-09-15 | Diamonds and whirls Block designs of a different sort — graphic figures on cubes. See also the University of Exeter page on the octahedral group O. |
The above site, finitegeometry.org/sc, illustrates how the symmetry
of various visual patterns is explained by what Zhang calls "interality."
Monday, August 8, 2022
The Rimshot Muse
Related philosophical reflections . . .
Waxing poetic . . .
"In the Garden of Adding live Even and Odd" — E. L. Doctorow
To wit:
1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6, since the LCM of 2 and 3 is 6.
See as well . . .
Monday, August 1, 2022
Interality Again: The Art of the Gefüge
"Schufreider shows that a network of linguistic relations
is set up between Gestalt, Ge-stell, and Gefüge, on the
one hand, and Streit, Riß, and Fuge, on the other . . . ."
— From p. 14 of French Interpretations of Heidegger ,
edited by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul.
State U. of New York Press, Albany, 2008. (Links added.)
One such "network of linguistic relations" might arise from
a non-mathematician's attempt to describe the diamond theorem.
(The phrase "network of linguistic relations" appears also in
Derrida's remarks on Husserl's Origin of Geometry .)
For more about "a system of slots," see interality in this journal.
The source of the above prefatory remarks by editors Pettigrew and Raffoul —
"If there is a specific network that is set up in 'The Origin of the Work of Art,'
a set of structural relations framed in linguistic terms, it is between
Gestalt, Ge-stell and Gefüge, on the one hand, and Streit, Riß and Fuge,
on the other; between (as we might try to translate it)
configuration, frame-work and structure (system), on the one hand, and
strife, split (slit) and slot, on the other. On our view, these two sets go
hand in hand; which means, to connect them to one another, we will
have to think of the configuration of the rift (Gestalt/Riß) as taking place
in a frame-work of strife (Ge-stell/Streit) that is composed through a system
of slots (Gefüge/Fuge) or structured openings."
— Quotation from page 197 of Schufreider, Gregory (2008):
"Sticking Heidegger with a Stela: Lacoue-Labarthe, art and politics."
Pp. 187-214 in David Pettigrew & François Raffoul (eds.),
French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception.
State University of New York Press, 2008.
Update at 5:14 AM ET Wednesday, August 3, 2022 —
See also "six-set" in this journal.
"There is such a thing as a six-set."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.
Sunday, July 31, 2022
Domingo for Ramos*
The reference to Vallega-Neu in posts that last night were tagged
The Ereignis Sanction leads to . . .
Heidegger’s ‘Contributions to Philosophy.’ An Introduction .
(Indiana University Press, 2003).
That book is about . . .
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) ,
trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999). German edition:
Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) ,
ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65
(Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1989).
* See today's news and a Log24 search for "Philippine."
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Dreams
Some may prefer a different sort of dream . . .
Background for the Stimmung dream, from May 2019 —
For a different type of lifeworld, see May 2019 in this journal.
Monday, February 14, 2022
Artbusters: Cubism
" Welcher Art ist die ursprüngliche Einheit,
daß sie sich in diese Scheidung auseinanderwirft,
und in welchem Sinn sind die Geschiedenen
hier als Wesung der Ab-gründigkeit gerade einig?
Hier kann es sich nicht um irgend eine »Dialektik«
handeln, sondern nur um die Wesung des Grundes
(der Wahrheit also) selbst."
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
Saturday, February 12, 2022
Das Geheimnis der Einheit
Thomas Mann on "the mystery of the unity" —
"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)
An Einheit-Geheimnis that is perhaps* more closely related
to pure mathematics** —
"What is the nature of the original unity
that throws itself apart in this separation,
and in what sense are the separated ones
here as the essence of the abyss?
Here it cannot be a question of any kind of 'dialectic,'
but only of the essence of the ground
(that is, of truth) itself." [Tr. by Google]
" Welcher Art ist die ursprüngliche Einheit,
daß sie sich in diese Scheidung auseinanderwirft,
und in welchem Sinn sind die Geschiedenen
hier als Wesung der Ab-gründigkeit gerade einig?
Hier kann es sich nicht um irgend eine »Dialektik«
handeln, sondern nur um die Wesung des Grundes
(der Wahrheit also) selbst."
* Or perhaps not .
** For a relevant Scheidung , see Eightfold Cube.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Turning Nine Continues*
From Log24 on Epiphany 2012 —
A version of the Zemeckis Cube —
* See Turning Nine (Log24, Nov. 8, 2021).
Friday, July 30, 2021
The Secret Subterranean River
The "secret, subterranean river" of Shulevitz is
a flow of thought favorable to the cause of feminism,
but not necessarily to other "revolutionary" ideas.
Compare and contrast:
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran"
— Coleridge, Kubla Khan
"Where Aleph the sacred symbol ran"
— Cullinane, "The Coxeter Aleph"
For group discussion:
How (if at all) is the "finitude" of Heidegger related to
mathematical finitude and The King of Infinite Space ?
Thursday, July 29, 2021
But Seriously, Bergen . . .
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
From the Krell Lab
“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us
gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”
— American adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest , 1956
“Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying
— p. 415 of Heidegger‘s Basic Writings ,
“Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. “Mirror-Play of the Fourfold” |
Red Dot in a Sacred Timeline
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Poetics for The Void (See last night’s Loki, Episode 5)
"Only poets and schizophrenics communicate in language
that defies rational analysis, and poets do not normally
do so in ordinary conversation . . . . They also do it with
a certain elegance, lacking in this case, and usually with
some kind of rhythm and sonority."
— Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology ,
discussing the following situation in a mental hospital:
"A strange man had approached and said, 'I'm not Slavic.'
Many paranoids begin a conversation with such assertions,
vitally important to them, but sounding a bit strange to
the rest of us."
See as well the previous two posts and a web page that
discusses whether Romania is a Slavic country.
Related material: Heidegger on "the night of lunacy."
Saturday, February 27, 2021
The Pencil Case
Clue
Here is a midrash on “desmic,” a term derived from the Greek desmé
( δέσμη: bundle, sheaf , or, in the mathematical sense, pencil —
French faisceau ), which is related to the term desmos , bond …
(The term “desmic,” as noted earlier, is relevant to the structure of
Heidegger’s Sternwürfel .)
“Gadzooks, I’ve done it again!” — Sherlock Hemlock
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Game of Royalties
For Holocaust Remembrance Day —
Little reportedly died at 79 on Jan. 7.
“Mr. Little submitted the manuscript for ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’
to 12 publishers. He received 12 rejections in response, before selling it for £2,500,
or about $3,400 (the equivalent of about $5,800 today). It was a meager amount,
but his genius was in the details: He sold only the rights to publish it in Britain and
the Commonwealth, and he asked for high royalties.” — Clay Risen, New York Times
Leachman reportedly died at 94 today.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : And it was you… who left my grandfather’s
book out for me to find.
Frau Blücher : Yes.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : So that I would…
Frau Blücher : Yes.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Then you and Victor were…
Frau Blücher : YES. YES. Say it. He vas my… BOYFRIEND!
In the spirit of Kinbote…
The real Frau Blücher was of course Hannah Arendt,
whose boyfriend was Martin Heidegger.
Cf. a Log24 post of April 10, 2017 —
From “Heidegger for Passover”
“Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying — p. 415 of Heidegger‘s Basic Writings , “Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. “Mirror-Play of the Fourfold” |
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Friday, June 26, 2020
Persons and Operators and Things
Harvard University Press on a book, Persons and Things, it published on March 31, 2010 Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons. In Persons and Things , Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us. |
I prefer the more straightforward insanity of Operators and Things .
Barbara Johnson reportedly died on Aug. 27, 2009. See that date
in other posts now tagged Autistic Enchantment. (That phrase is
the sort of sneering tag one may expect from deplorable academics.)
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Continental Taste-Envy
The title is a phrase by Kyle Smith, who writes with
considerable taste and little envy.
Then there is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein . . .
See as well Heidegger at Davos.
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Hors d’Oeuvre
From the May Day 2016 link above, in "Sunday Appetizer from 1984" —
The 2015 German edition of Beautiful Mathematics , a 2011 Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book, was retitled Mathematische Appetithäppchen — Mathematical Appetizers . The German edition mentions the author's source, omitted in the original American edition, for his section 5.17, "A Group of Operations" (in German, 5.17, "Eine Gruppe von Operationen")—
That source was a document that has been on the Web since 2002. The document was submitted to the MAA in 1984 but was rejected. The German edition omits the document's title, and describes it as merely a source for "further information on this subject area." |
From the Gap Dance link above, in "Reading for Devil's Night" —
“Das Nichts nichtet.” — Martin Heidegger.
And "Appropriation Appropriates."
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Cleavage
From Martin Heidegger's
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) ,
Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly,
Indiana University Press, 1999 (first published in German
in 1989 as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) but
written in 1936-1938 —
"The 'between' [das Zwischen ] is the simple 'bursting open'
that enowns be-ing to a being, which up until then is held back
from what is ownmost to it and is not yet to be named a being.
This 'bursting open' is the clearing for the sheltered. But the
'bursting open' does not disperse. and the clearing is not a mere
emptiness.
The 'between' [das Zwischen ] which bursts open gathers
what it removes into the open of its strifing and refusing
belongingness, moves unto the ab-ground , out of which everything
(god, man, world, earth) recoils in swaying into itself and thus leaves
to be-ing the unique decidedness of en-ownment."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 341)
"Enownment and enstrifing, historical grounding and decision,
uniqueness and the onefold, what has the character of
the between [Zwischenhafte ] and the cleavage [Geklüft ] —
they never name the essential sway of be-ing as properties
but rather in each case the whole essential swaying* of its essential
sway."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 342)
* For "swaying" as "unfolding," see (for instance)
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
also George Kovacs, Thinking and Be-ing in Heidegger's
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) ,
Zeta Books, 2015.
Monday, February 3, 2020
A Kuhnian Register
Ereignis in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy —
Further aspects of the essential unfolding of Being are revealed by what is perhaps the key move in the Contributions—a rethinking of Being in terms of the notion of Ereignis, a term translated variously as ‘event’ (most closely reflecting its ordinary German usage), ‘appropriation’, ‘appropriating event’, ‘event of appropriation’ or ‘enowning’. (For an analysis which tracks Heidegger's use of the term Ereignis at various stages of his thought, see Vallega-Neu 2010). The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift. — Michael Wheeler, 2011 |
See as well "reordering" in Sunday evening's post Tetrads for McLuhan
and in a Log24 search for Reordering + Steiner.
Ereignis*
A sequel to Xmas Eve 2019 —
* "Ereignis appears in Heidegger's later works
and is not easily summarized." — Wikipedia
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Paradigm Shift
Illustration, from a search in this journal for “Symplectic” —
.
Some background: Rift-design in this journal and …
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Lucy Noir …
… Continued from August 26 —
Heidegger, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,"
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949, pp. 291-316—
See as well Readings for St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2005.
Monday, December 9, 2019
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Paz:
Some context for what Heidegger called
das Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts
From Helen Lane's translation of El Mono Gramático ,
a book by Nobel winner Octavio Paz first published
in Barcelona by Seix Barral in 1974 —
Simultaneous perspective does not look upon language as a path because it is not the search for meaning that orients it. Poetry does not attempt to discover what there is at the end of the road; it conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations as they intertwine or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other. Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses, volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations are crystallized time: although they are perpetually in motion, they always point to the same hour—the hour of change. Each one of them contains all the others, each one is inside the others: change is only the oft-repeated and ever-different metaphor of identity.
— Paz, Octavio. The Monkey Grammarian |
A related 1960 meditation from Claude Lévi-Strauss taken from a
Log24 post of St. Andrew's Day 2017, "The Matrix for Quantum Mystics":
"In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that
this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time
representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both
'in time' (it consists of a succession of events) and 'beyond'
(its value is permanent)." — Claude Lévi-Strauss
I prefer the earlier, better-known, remarks on time by T. S. Eliot
in Four Quartets , and the following four quartets
(from The Matrix Meets the Grid) —
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Propriation
The phrase "quantum space" in today's 10:45 AM post
was used earlier in a book title —
Amazon.com gives the Quantum Space publication date
for its Kindle edition as April 10, 2017.
I prefer my own remarks of April 10, 2017 —
From "Heidegger for Passover"
"Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying
— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings ,
"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" |
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Perspectives from a Chinese Jar
" . . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
"The Grand Valley spirit never dies."
— Adapted from the Tao Te Ching
Monday, June 26, 2017
Four Dots
Analogies — “A : B :: C : D” may be read “A is to B as C is to D.”
Gian-Carlo Rota on Heidegger…
“… The universal as is given various names in Heidegger’s writings….
The discovery of the universal as is Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy….
The universal ‘as‘ is the surgence of sense in Man, the shepherd of Being.
The disclosure of the primordial as is the end of a search that began with Plato….
This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.”
— “Three Senses of ‘A is B’ in Heideggger,” Ch. 17 in Indiscrete Thoughts
See also Four Dots in this journal.
Some context: McLuhan + Analogy.
Friday, June 23, 2017
A Kind of Cross
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
See also Heidegger + Rift in this journal.
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Art Space
Detail of an image in the previous post —
This suggests a review of a post on a work of art by fashion photographer
Peter Lindbergh, made when he was younger and known as "Sultan."
The balls in the foreground relate Sultan's work to my own.
Linguistic backstory —
The art space where the pieces by Talman and by Lindbergh
were displayed is Museum Tinguely in Basel.
As the previous post notes, the etymology of "glamour" (as in
fashion photography) has been linked to "grammar" (as in
George Steiner's Grammars of Creation ). A sculpture by
Tinguely (fancifully representing Heidegger) adorns one edition
of Grammars .
Friday, May 5, 2017
For the Gods of Mexico*
A swimmer who won Olympic gold in 1936 reportedly died today.
Related material from August 4, 2008 —
Jodie Foster and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics
“Heraclitus…. says: ‘The ruler
— An Introduction to Metaphysics, |
Posts tagged Swimmer may or may not be relevant.
* See …
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Review
From a 2002 note, "The Shining of May 29" —
Related material: The remarks in this journal on April 1, 2013.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
April First Interality
Data for an essay titled "Interality in Heidegger" —
See also Log24 posts
on that same date —
April 1, 2015.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Monday, October 10, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Tinguely Museum
Tinguely, "Martin Heidegger,
Philosopher," sculpture, 1988
See also Talman in this journal.
Friday, September 30, 2016
Desmic Midrash
The author of the review in the previous post, Dara Horn, supplies
below a midrash on "desmic," a term derived from the Greek desmé
( δέσμη: bundle, sheaf , or, in the mathematical sense, pencil —
French faisceau ), which is related to the term desmos , bond …
(The term "desmic," as noted earlier, is relevant to the structure of
Heidegger's Sternwürfel .)
The Horn midrash —
(The "medieval philosopher" here is not the remembered pre-Christian
Ben Sirah (Ecclesiasticus ) but the philosopher being read — Maimonides:
Guide for the Perplexed , 3:51.)
Here of course "that bond" may be interpreted as corresponding to the
Greek desmos above, thus also to the desmic structure of the
stellated octahedron, a sort of three-dimensional Star of David.
See "desmic" in this journal.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Articulation
Cassirer vs. Heidegger at Harvard —
A remembrance for Michaelmas —
A version of Heidegger’s “Sternwürfel ” —
From Log24 on the upload date for the above figure —
Reading for Michaelmas 2016
A review of …
Continental Divide : Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
By Peter E. Gordon
(Harvard University Press, 426 pp., $39.95)
The reviewer: David Nirenberg in The New Republic .
The review, dated January 13, 2011, ran in the
February 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Star Wars
See also in this journal "desmic," a term related
to the structure of Heidegger's Sternwürfel .
Monday, August 29, 2016
Into the Woods
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Friday, November 27, 2015
Einstein and Geometry
(A Prequel to Dirac and Geometry)
"So Einstein went back to the blackboard.
And on Nov. 25, 1915, he set down
the equation that rules the universe.
As compact and mysterious as a Viking rune,
it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress…."
— Dennis Overbye in The New York Times online,
November 24, 2015
Some pure mathematics I prefer to the sagging Viking mattress —
Readings closely related to the above passage —
Thomas Hawkins, "From General Relativity to Group Representations:
the Background to Weyl's Papers of 1925-26," in Matériaux pour
l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle: Actes du colloque
à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné, Nice, 1996 (Soc. Math.
de France, Paris, 1998), pp. 69-100.
The 19th-century algebraic theory of invariants is discussed
as what Weitzenböck called a guide "through the thicket
of formulas of general relativity."
Wallace Givens, "Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces," in
Annals of Mathematics Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1937,
pp. 355-385.
Tensors (also used by Einstein in 1915) are related to
the theory of line complexes in three-dimensional
projective space and to the matrices used by Dirac
in his 1928 work on quantum mechanics.
For those who prefer metaphors to mathematics —
Rota fails to cite the source of his metaphor.
|
Monday, June 8, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
George Steiner vs. the Order of St. Benedict
See Steiner's phrase "Language Animal" in this journal
and the corresponding authentic phrase from a webpage
by a Benedictine monk —
Friday, May 8, 2015
Reflections of a Language Animal*
Overlook/Duckworth, pp.48, £9.99
* "Language animal" is a phrase apparently
invented by Steiner in 1969 that he later
attributed vaguely to the ancient Greeks.
Spielraum
Review:
Illustrating the Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts
"At the point of convergence
by Octavio Paz, translated by |
Friday December 5, 2008
|
Monday, May 4, 2015
Light to Light
From yesterday —
Another remark on "still light" —
" . . . After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world." — Four Quartets
Note the page number, 168, in the above quote from Capobianco.
From another page 168,* a reproduction of a title page —
"In quella parte del libro…."
* In Jewel Spears Brooker's book
T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews ,
Cambridge University Press, 2004
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Das Scheinen
The title of Saturday night's post, "Die Scheinung ," is taken from
a 1920 book on a German poet, where "Scheinung " is associated
with "Maja ," a German spelling of a word with the connotation of
"the veil of illusion."
The phrase "Das Scheinen " is closer to "The Shining" in the
novel of that title by Stephen King. Some related remarks —
From a review of Capobianco's Engaging Heidegger —
"refreshing for its clarity and scholarly precision"
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Shining Through
A Look magazine article of July 18, 1950,
"Working Debutante," had photos of
Betsy von Furstenberg by Stanley Kubrick.
Monday, April 6, 2015
For the Church of the Mad Men
Taylor, Buttrick, Taylor on Buttrick
— Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
For Rilke’s Panther
The title refers to yesterday evening's remarks titled
"Free the Philosophical Beast" in The Stone , a NY Times weblog.
The January 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society
has an article by Michael J. Barany. From November 2012 remarks
by Barany :
"A highlight of the workshop was Cathryn Carson’s interpretation
of the transcendental phenomenology and historicism of Husserl,
Heidegger, Cassirer, and a few others, launched from a moving
reflection on the experience of reading Kuhn."
See Carson's paper "Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas,
Heisenberg," Continental Philosophy Review (2010) 42: 483–509.
Related material: Monday's Log24 posts Rota on Husserl and Annals of Perception.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Broad and Bright
Requiem for a painter in this evening's NY Times :
In a review for ARTNews , the painter and critic
Fairfield Porter called her work “traditional and radical.”
Her paintings, he wrote, “are broad and bright,
considered without being fussy, thoughtful but never
pedantic.”
Not that there's anything wrong with being pedantic…
Update of Dec. 10, 2014, to a post of Dec. 9 :
The passage from Nicholas of Cusa was added
because it indicates a more reliable source than
Stambaugh, because of its relevance to lines
about the metaphorical significance of light in
"I Origins," and because it contains the number
1111.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Plan 9…
Or: Bullshit for Brit … continues.
From the new film "I Origins," starring Brit Marling —
Plan 9:
The protagonist of "I Origins" is led to the above billboard
by apparently chance encounters with 11 's — such as the
1111 on the following page —
Update of Dec. 10, 2014: The "bullshit" in the subtitle above refers
to the remarks of Joan Stambaugh, not those of Nicholas of Cusa.
The passage from Nicholas was added because it indicates a more
reliable source than Stambaugh, because it is relevant to lines
about the metaphorical significance of light in "I Origins," and
because it contains the number 1111.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
October Nine: Lyche at Bodø
Click to enlarge.
See also Apollo in this journal.
“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”
— Katherine Neville, who deserves some sort of prize for literature.
— Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
As Is
"That simple operator, 'as,' turns out to carry within its philosophical grammar
a remarkable complex field* of operations…."
— Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry,
Cambridge University Press, 1989, page 343
See also Rota on Heidegger (What "As" Is, July 6, 2010), and Lead Belly
on the Rock Island Line — "You got to ride it like you find it."
* Update of Oct. 10, 2014: See also "Complex + Grid" in this journal.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
OOPs
Or: Two Rivets Short of a Paradigm
Detail from an author photo:
From rivet-rivet.net:
The philosopher Graham Harman is invested in re-thinking the autonomy of objects and is part of a movement called Object-Oriented-Philosophy (OOP). Harman wants to question the authority of the human being at the center of philosophy to allow the insertion of the inanimate into the equation. With the aim of proposing a philosophy of objects themselves, Harman puts the philosophies of Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger in dialogue. Along these lines, Harman proposes an unconventional reading of the tool-being analysis made by Heidegger. For Harman, the term tool does not refer only to human-invented tools such as hammers or screwdrivers, but to any kind of being or thing such as a stone, dog or even a human. Further, he uses the terms objects, beings, tools and things, interchangeably, placing all on the same ontological footing. In short, there is no “outside world.” Harman distinguishes two characteristics of the tool-being: invisibility and totality. Invisibility means that an object is not simply used but is: “[an object] form(s) a cosmic infrastructure of artificial and natural and perhaps supernatural forces, power by which our last action is besieged.” For instance, nails, wooden boards and plumbing tubes do their work to keep a house “running” silently (invisibly) without being viewed or noticed. Totality means that objects do not operate alone but always in relation to other objects–the smallest nail can, for example, not be disconnected from wooden boards, the plumbing tubes or from the cement. Depending on the point of view of each entity (nail, tube, etc.) a different reality will emerge within the house. For Harman, “to refer to an object as a tool-being is not to say that it is brutally exploited as a means to an end, but only that it is torn apart by the universal duel between the silent execution of an object’s reality and the glistening aura of its tangible surface.” — From "The Action of Things," an M.A. thesis at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, by Manuela Moscoso, May 2011, edited by Sarah Demeuse |
From Wikipedia, a programming paradigm:
See also posts tagged Turing's Cathedral, and Alley Oop (Feb. 11, 2003).
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Mars Package
“For me it is a sign that we have fundamentally different
conceptions of the work of the intelligence services.”
— Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in
theguardian.com, Saturday, 12 July 2014, 14.32 EDT
Another sort of service, thanks to Dan Brown and Tom Hanks:
Friday, July 11, 2014 |
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Grundlagenkrise*
The title was suggested by a 1921 article
by Hermann Weyl and by a review* of
a more recent publication —
The above Harvard Gazette piece on Davos is
from St. Ursula’s Day, 2010. See also this journal
on that date.
See as well a Log24 search for Davos.
A more interesting piece by Peter E. Gordon
(author of the above Davos book) is his review
of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age .
The review is titled
“The Place of the Sacred
in the Absence of God.”
(The place of the sacred is not, perhaps, Davos,
but a more abstract location.)
* Grundlagenkrise was a tag for a Jan. 13, 2011,
review in The New Republic of Gordon’s
book on Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Sermon
Odin's Jewel
Jim Holt, the author of remarks in yesterday's
Saturday evening post—
"It turns out that the Kyoto school of Buddhism
makes Heidegger seem like Rush Limbaugh—
it’s so rarified, I’ve never been able to
understand it at all. I’ve been knocking my head
against it for years."
— Vanity Fair Daily , July 16, 2012
Backstory: Odin + Jewel in this journal.
See also Odin on the Kyoto school —
For another version of Odin's jewel, see Log24
on the date— July 16, 2012— that Holt's Vanity Fair
remarks were published. Scroll to the bottom of the
"Mapping Problem continued" post for an instance of
the Galois tesseract —
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
“The Stone” Today Suggests…
The Philosopher's Gaze , by David Michael Levin, The post-metaphysical question—question for a post-metaphysical phenomenology—is therefore: Can the perceptual field, the ground of perception, be released from our historical compulsion to represent it in a way that accommodates our will to power and its need to totalize and reify the presencing of being? In other words: Can the ground be experienced as ground? Can its hermeneutical way of presencing, i.e., as a dynamic interplay of concealment and unconcealment, be given appropriate respect in the receptivity of a perception that lets itself be appropriated by the ground and accordingly lets the phenomenon of the ground be what and how it is? Can the coming-to-pass of the ontological difference that is constitutive of all the local figure-ground differences taking place in our perceptual field be made visible hermeneutically, and thus without violence to its withdrawal into concealment? But the question concerning the constellation of figure and ground cannot be separated from the question concerning the structure of subject and object. Hence the possibility of a movement beyond metaphysics must also think the historical possibility of breaking out of this structure into the spacing of the ontological difference: différance , the primordial, sensuous, ekstatic écart . As Heidegger states it in his Parmenides lectures, it is a question of "the way historical man belongs within the bestowal of being (Zufügung des Seins ), i.e., the way this order entitles him to acknowledge being and to be the only being among all beings to see the open" (PE* 150, PG** 223. Italics added). We might also say that it is a question of our response-ability, our capacity as beings gifted with vision, to measure up to the responsibility for perceptual responsiveness laid down for us in the "primordial de-cision" (Entscheid ) of the ontological difference (ibid.). To recognize the operation of the ontological difference taking place in the figure-ground difference of the perceptual Gestalt is to recognize the ontological difference as the primordial Riß , the primordial Ur-teil underlying all our perceptual syntheses and judgments—and recognize, moreover, that this rift, this division, decision, and scission, an ekstatic écart underlying and gathering all our so-called acts of perception, is also the only "norm" (ἀρχή ) by which our condition, our essential deciding and becoming as the ones who are gifted with sight, can ultimately be judged. * PE: Parmenides of Heidegger in English— Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 ** PG: Parmenides of Heidegger in German— Gesamtausgabe , vol. 54— Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 |
Examples of "the primordial Riß " as ἀρχή —
For an explanation in terms of mathematics rather than philosophy,
see the diamond theorem. For more on the Riß as ἀρχή , see
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Stevens and the Rock
Passage quoted in A Philosopher's Stone (April 4, 2013)—
This passage from Heidegger suggested the lexicon excerpt on
to hypokeimenon (the underlying) in yesterday's post Lexicon.
A related passage:
The Eliade passage was quoted in a 1971 Ph.D. thesis
on Wallace Stevens.
Some context— Stevens's Rock in this journal.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Night of Lunacy*
Structure vs. Character continued…
Structure |
|
Related vocabulary:
Nick Tosches on the German word “Quell “
* The title is from Heidegger.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
A Philosopher’s Stone
"Core" (in the original, Kern ) is perhaps
not the best translation of hypokeimenon :
See also Heidegger's original German:
Related material: In this journal, "underlie" and "underlying."
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Shard
A post suggested by an article on The Shard of London
in this morning's Wall Street Journal—
As for the "Personal Jesus" song that accompanies the above video tribute,
listen to Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan in recent Narnia films
and consider the saying of C. S. Lewis that Aslan is not a tame lion.
Here Lewis may, if one likes, be regarded as the "inkling" of Heidegger
in last night's post—
Claves Regni Caelorum
Or: Night of Lunacy
From 9 PM Monday —
Note that the last line, together with the page number, forms
a sort of key—
The rest of the story—
For one reinterpretation of the page number 304, see a link—
Sermon— from Tuesday's post Diamond Speech.
The linked-to sermon itself has a link, based on a rereading
of 304 as 3/04, to a post of March 4, 2004, with…
WW and ZZ
as rendered by figures from the Kaleidoscope Puzzle—
Yesterday morning the same letter-combinations occurred
in a presentation at CERN of a newly discovered particle—
(Click for context.)
Since the particle under discussion may turn out to be the
God particle, it seems fitting to interpret WW and ZZ as part
of an imagined requiem High Mass.
Ron Howard, director of a film about CERN and the God particle,
may regard this imaginary Mass as performed for the late
Andy Griffith, who played Howard's father in a television series.
Others may prefer to regard the imaginary Mass as performed
for the late John E. Brooks, S. J., who served as president of
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., for 24 years.
Griffith died Tuesday. Brooks died Monday.
For some background on the Holy Cross, see posts of
Sept. 14 (Holy Cross Day) and Sept. 15, 2010—
For more lunacy, see…
Continue a search for thirty-three and three
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
Monday, July 2, 2012
Stiftung
Heidegger, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,"
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949, pp. 291-316—
See also Hexagram 36.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Carroll Thanks the Academy
Gary Gutting, "Arguing About Language," in "The Stone,"
The New York Times philosophy column, yesterday—
There's a sense in which we speak language
and a sense in which, in Mallarmé's famous phrase,
“language itself speaks.”
Famous? A Google Book Search for
"language itself speaks" Mallarmé
yields 2 results, neither helpful.
But a Google Book Search for
"language itself speaks" Heidegger
yields "about 312 results."
A related search yields the following—
Paul Valéry, encountering Un Coup de Dés in Mallarmé’s worksheets in 1897, described the text as tracing the pattern of thought itself:
It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms….
… there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word! (Leonardo 309*)
* The page number is apparently a reference to The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé , translated by Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler, Princeton University Press, 1972. (As a temporal form, "309" might be interpreted as a reference to 3/09, March 9, the date of a webpage on the Void.)
For example—
Background:
Deconstructing Alice
and Symbology.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Die Nichtung
"It seems that Hilbert had no taste for philosophers….
Hans Rademacher told this reviewer that, after Heidegger
once lectured in Göttingen, Hilbert gleefully repeated
to everyone the phrase "Das Nichts nichtet die Nichtung ."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, Discrete Thoughts , 2nd ed., p. 233
Die Lichtung
See January 4th, 2012.
(This link resulted from an application of Heidegger's
philosophy of "the opening" and "the shining" (Die Lichtung ).)
See also The Shining of May 29.
Update of 12:19 AM Feb. 3, 2012—
The undated (but cached by Google on January 4th, 2012)
unsigned post from a deleted weblog linked to above as
"an application" is also available in a version that is signed
(but still undated).
The Opening
From ShiftLock in this journal—
"Philosophy knows nothing of the opening."
— Heidegger
See also a post of September 25, 2009,
and a film whose opening was on that date.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Black Swan
Background: Greek Orthodox in Lebanon. |
The Star |
For greater philosophical depth, see an ad for "Tree of Life," an upcoming film by Terrence Malick, by clicking the "Venus Herself" link above.
The trailer for "Tree of Life" is said to be opening with the film "Black Swan" today.
See also articles on Malick at Wikipedia and at Senses of Cinema, and Malick's translation of Heidegger's 1929 essay "Vom Wesen des Grundes " into English. It was published under the title The Essence of Reasons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1969, bilingual edition).
Thursday, September 2, 2010
In the Details
What's wrong with this picture?
Google News today—
Midrash on what's wrong—
Related material from August 29—
Camp Germania
(Click for Source)
Related material from Camp Germania—
For a Festschrift on his eightieth birthday, she [Hannah Arendt] wrote “the storm that blows through Heidegger's work—like the one which blows across centuries against it from Plato's works—does not stem from this century.” And from her first book—on the idea of love in St. Augustine—to her last, she chose a much different path. While her public remarks were full of praise, her private ones were less so. After the war, Arendt, since married, returned to Germany and spent an uneasy afternoon with her former love and his resolutely anti-Semitic wife Elfriede. What she wrote of her experience was in her diary and was not published until after her death. This was not a diary entry like others she wrote: it was an animal fable called “Heidegger the Fox.” It begins, “Heidegger says proudly: ‘People say Heidegger is a fox.' This is the true story of Heidegger the fox.” She continued….
— "Being There," in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 25, Spring 2007
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Home from Home continued
Or— Childhood's Rear End
This post was suggested by…
- Today's New York Times—
"For many artists Electric Lady has become a home away from home…. For Jimmy Page the personal imprimaturs of Hendrix and Mr. Kramer made all the difference when Led Zeppelin mixed parts of 'Houses of the Holy' there in 1972." - The album cover pictures for "Houses of the Holy"
- Boleskine House, home to Aleister Crowley and (occasionally) to Jimmy Page.
Related material:
The Zeppelin album cover, featuring rear views of nude children, was shot at the Giant's Causeway.
From a page at led-zeppelin.org—
See also Richard Rorty on Heidegger—
Safranski, the author of ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy,'' never steps back and pronounces judgment on Heidegger, but something can be inferred from the German title of his book: ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland'' (''A Master From Germany''). Heidegger was, undeniably, a master, and was very German indeed. But Safranski's spine-chilling allusion is to Paul Celan's best-known poem, ''Death Fugue.'' In Michael Hamburger's translation, its last lines are:
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith.
No one familiar with Heidegger's work can read Celan's poem without recalling Heidegger's famous dictum: ''Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.'' Nobody who makes this association can reread the poem without having the images of Hitler and Heidegger — two men who played with serpents and daydreamed — blend into each other. Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the crematories — the ''grave in the air'' — will linger on their pages.
Heidegger is the antithesis of the sort of philosopher (John Stuart Mill, William James, Isaiah Berlin) who assumes that nothing ultimately matters except human happiness. For him, human suffering is irrelevant: philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw the history of the West not in terms of increasing freedom or of decreasing misery, but as a poem. ''Being's poem,'' he once wrote, ''just begun, is man.''
For Heidegger, history is a sequence of ''words of Being'' — the words of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their self-image, and thereby built successive ''houses of Being.'' The history of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, is to ''preserve the force of the most elementary words'' — to prevent the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being banalized.
Related musical meditations—
Shine On (Saturday, April 21, 2007), Shine On, Part II, and Built (Sunday, April 22, 2007).
Related pictorial meditations—
The Giant's Causeway at Peter J. Cameron's weblog
and the cover illustration for Diamond Theory (1976)—
The connection between these two images is the following from Cameron's weblog today—
… as we saw, there are two different Latin squares of order 4;
one, but not the other, can be extended to a complete set
of 3 MOLS [mutually orthogonal Latin squares].
The underlying structures of the square pictures in the Diamond Theory cover are those of the two different Latin squares of order 4 mentioned by Cameron.
Connection with childhood—
The children's book A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle. See math16.com. L'Engle's fantasies about children differ from those of Arthur C. Clarke and Led Zeppelin.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
That X
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper hardcover, 1962, p. 262—
"…the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve
the force of the most elemental words…."
Heidegger was quoted, in a different translation, by Richard Rorty in 1998
in a review of Ein Meister aus Deutschland.
Related material: an August 18 death and this journal on that date—
"… it is impossible that there should be time if there is no soul,
except that there could be that X which time is…."
— Aristotle, Physics, IV.14, translated by Edward Hussey
See also Berlinerblau in this journal on August 10.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Scowl
From the preface to the inaugural issue of Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies—
Regarding the choice of name for this journal, tympan or tympanum is a word that designates several objects at once. Tympan is perhaps first of all a typographical term: as a printer's term in early book production, a tympan designated "the iron frame covered with parchment on which the paper was placed." Taken as an anatomical term, the word tympanum is another term for the eardrum, the oblique stretching of tissue between the auditory canal and the middle ear that allows one to hear: to hear others, to hear music, or even to hear oneself speak. The tympanum is a partition of the ear that separates inside from outside, translating various tones and punctuations, a liminal membrane traversed by hearing others speak. In this instance, the tympanum is a tissue, a weave or web that mediates hearing. It is by extension the term for the diaphragm of a tele-phone, that technological figure of the spatialization of the voice. As an architectural term tympanum names the pediment that sits atop the cornice or frieze of a building. And to this heterogeneous list one might add that in ancient Greece a tympanum, like the stoa or colonnades, was a gathering space for the discussion of philosophy. All these meanings could be enlisted to indicate the interests of this new journal.
By its very nature, a world wide web site would be a site of a mediation of or meditation on the problematic of space and place (in short: of "site" itself), and of their dislocation. In this way the web opens the possibility for a journal concerned with the problem of a mediated or textualized hearing.
Several of the articles contained in this first issue of Tympanum share a thematic of location and of reading and hearing….
Deborah Levitt's essay on Heidegger and theatre, in its exploration of the problem of space and place, implicitly touches on the very medium of the web: the perpetual dislocation of place from space. Levitt couples several of Heidegger's writings together with Artaud's on her Freiburg-Paris Express. Levitt's meditation on theory and theatre is at once incisive and innovative, and locates its opening problematic in the substitution of a metaphysics of sight by site, a move which she says opens a spatiality. In a recent issue of Assemblage, Sam Weber makes some remarks on the metaphysics of site that could indeed be used as a succinct introduction to the problems that Levitt's essay, Heidegger and the Theatre of Truth, engages:
If what we call "space" is, like the Platonic chora, on the one hand always already caught up in the process of making room for that determinate other of space that can be called place or site, and if, on the other hand, this process of making room remains distinct from the particular places and sites it makes way for, then the emergence of the latter from the former will inevitably appear as a more or less violent event. Violent, because the staking out of territory and the assignment of positions and posts can never simply legitimate itself in terms of preexisting borders. It cannot do this, since there is no original order to which such a process of partition might appeal without equivocation. In place of such an origin, there is chora: the process of partition and repartition as such, except that "as such" here is impossible to distinguish from: "as other." Such partition and repartition constitute the law, the nomos, of chora…3
3 Samuel Weber, "The Parallax View: Place and Space in Plato and Benjamin," Assemblage 20, MIT Press: 1993: 88.
The Tympanum preface (1998) is by Peter Woodruff.
Wallace Stevens—
"The pediment
Lifts up its heavy scowl before them."
Scowl courtesy of Samuel Weber—
- Author of "The Parallax View"
- Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space
(Apr., 1993), pp. 88-89
(article consists of 2 pages) - Published by: The MIT Press
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Rift Designs
From the current index to obituaries at Telegraph.co.uk—
Teufel is also featured in today's New York Times—
"Mr. Teufel became a semicelebrity, helped in no small part by his last name, which means 'devil' in German."
From Group Analysis , June 1993, vol. 26 no. 2, 203-212—
by Ronald Sandison, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2EY, UK
In my contribution to the Group Analysis Special Section: "Aspects of Religion in Group Analysis" (Sandison, 1993) I hinted that any consideration of a spiritual dimension to the group involves us in a discussion on whether we are dealing with good or evil spirits. But if we say that God is in the group, why is not the Devil there also? Can good and evil coexist in the same group matrix? Is the recognition of evil "nothing but" the ability to distinguish between good and bad? If not, then what is evil? Is it no more than the absence of good?
These and other questions were worked on at a joint Institute of Group Analysis and Group-Analytic Society (London) Workshop entitled "The Problem of Good and Evil." We considered the likelihood that good and evil coexist in all of us, as well as in the whole of the natural world, not only on earth, but in the cosmos and in God himself What we actually do with good and evil is to split them apart, thereby shelving the problem but at the same time creating irreconcilable opposites. This article examines this splitting and how we can work with it psychoanalytically.
This suggests a biblical remark—
"Now there was a day… when the sons of God
came to present themselves before the Lord,
and Satan came also among them."
— Job 1:6, quoted by Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday
Sandison died on June 18. See the Thursday, August 5, Log24 post "The Matrix."
Teufel died on July 6. See the Log24 posts for that day.
The title of this post, "rift designs," refers to a recurring theme in the July 6 posts. It is taken from Heidegger.
From a recent New Yorker review of Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson—
"Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms."
Following this advice, we find—
"Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing."
— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993
"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens."
— Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Quest for the Lost Origin…
Project Management at Villanova
Yesterday's noon post, "Lying Forth," linked to a passage by Walter A. Brogan, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
A related Brogan remark for Harrison Ford's birthday—
"The last few pages of the text 'Différance' [an essay by Derrida] are a refutation of the nostalgia and hope involved in Heidegger's ontology, a rejection of the quest for the lost origin and final word."
Walter A. Brogan, "The Original Difference," pp. 31-40 in Derrida and Différance, ed. by David C. Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 32
See, too, "Make a Différance."
Monday, July 12, 2010
Through Phenomenology to Thought
Lying Forth
Related material:
Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being,
by Walter A. Brogan, (SUNY Press, 2005)—
Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought,
by William J. Richardson, S.J., (Springer, 1974)—
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Language Lab
From a search in this journal for "Krell"—
Dialogue from an American adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest—
“… Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us
gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”
– Taken from a video, Forbidden Planet Monster Attack
From yesterday's A Manifold Showing—
"Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it
in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing."
(p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell,
HarperCollins paperback, 1993)
German versions found on the Web—
„Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens.“ 323
323 Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache, S. 259.
"Das Regende im Zeigen der Sage ist das Eignen. Es erbringt das An- und Abwesen in sein jeweilig Eigenes, aus dem dieses sich an ihm selbst zeigt und nach seiner Art verweilt. Das erbringende Eignen, das die Sage als die Zeige in ihrem Zeigen regt, heiße das Ereignen. Es er-gibt das Freie der Lichtung, in die Anwesendes anwähren, aus der Abwesendes entgehen und im Entzug sein Währen behalten kann. Was das Ereignen durch die Sage ergibt, ist nie Wirkung einer Ursache, nicht die Folge eines Grundes. Das erbringende Eignen, das Ereignen, ist gewährender als jedes Wirken, Machen und Gründen. Das Ereignende ist das Ereignis selbst – und nichts außerdem. Das Ereignis, im Zeigen der Sage erblickt, läßt sich weder als ein Vorkommnis noch als ein Geschehen vorstellen, sondern nur im Zeigen der Sage als das Gewährende erfahren. Es gibt nichts anderes, worauf das Ereignis noch zurückführt, woraus es gar erklärt werden könnte. Das Ereignen ist kein Ergebnis (Resultat) aus anderem, aber die Er-gebnis, deren reichendes Geben erst dergleichen wie ein `Es gibt' gewährt, dessen auch noch `das Sein' bedarf, um als Anwesen in sein Eigenes zu gelangen. Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des Vielfältigen Zeigens. Das Ereignis ist das Unscheinbarste des Unscheinbaren, das Einfachste des Einfachen, das Nächste des Nahen und das Fernste des Fernen, darin wir Sterbliche uns zeitlebens aufhalten." 8
8 M. Heidegger: Unterwegs zur Sprache. S. 258 f.
From Google Translate:
"The event brings together the outline of the legend and unfolds it to the structure of the manifold showing."
Saturday, July 10, 2010
A Manifold Showing
"Heidegger suggests that we experience the saying of language as a shining forth:
'It lets what is coming to presence shine forth, lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish. The saying is by no means the supplemental linguistic expression of what shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows.' (pp. 413-414).
But what is the basis and origin of this possibility of saying? The happening of saying in the clearing, its allowing things to shine forth, can also be called an 'owning.' Owning is the event of a thing’s coming into its own, of its showing itself as itself. Heidegger also calls it 'propriating,' 'en-owning,' or Ereignis:
'Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing. (p. 415)'"
— "Heidegger: On the Way to Language," by Paul Livingston
Page references are apparently to Heidegger's Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993.
See also Shining Forth.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
07 Book
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/books/07book.html)
The above headline from this morning's New York Times is a rather strong reminder of a post linked to here last night— a post from April 10, 2004 (Holy Saturday), titled "Harrowing."
The book under review is a biography of William Golding, also quoted here in "Harrowing."
From that post—
“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”
– Stephen Spender, introduction to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
Related material:
Theater of Truth rift-design— Definition by Deborah Levitt— "Rift. The stroke or rending by which a world worlds, opening both the 'old' world and the self-concealing earth to the possibility of a new world. As well as being this stroke, the rift is the site— the furrow or crack— created by the stroke. As the 'rift design' it is the particular characteristics or traits of this furrow." – "Heidegger and the Theater of Truth," in Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, Vol. 1, 1998 See also "harrow up" + Hamlet in this journal. |
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
A Serious Artist
Today's Google logo
honors a serious artist:
Related material:
That post quotes the words of another serious artist,
Malcolm Lowry, on a barranca, or deep ravine.
(See also Heidegger's "rift" concept.)
For a less serious rift, see the art of Kylie Minogue.
What “As” Is
or: Combinatorics (Rota) as Philosophy (Heidegger) as Geometry (Me)
“Dasein’s full existential structure is constituted by
the ‘as-structure’ or ‘well-joined structure’ of the rift-design*…”
— Gary Williams, post of January 22, 2010
Background—
Gian-Carlo Rota on Heidegger…
“… The universal as is given various names in Heidegger’s writings….
The discovery of the universal as is Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy….
The universal ‘as‘ is the surgence of sense in Man, the shepherd of Being.
The disclosure of the primordial as is the end of a search that began with Plato….
This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.”
— “Three Senses of ‘A is B’ in Heideggger,” Ch. 17 in Indiscrete Thoughts
… and projective points as separating rifts—
* rift-design— Definition by Deborah Levitt—
“Rift. The stroke or rending by which a world worlds, opening both the ‘old’ world and the self-concealing earth to the possibility of a new world. As well as being this stroke, the rift is the site— the furrow or crack— created by the stroke. As the ‘rift design‘ it is the particular characteristics or traits of this furrow.”
— “Heidegger and the Theater of Truth,” in Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, Vol. 1, 1998
Monday, June 7, 2010
Inspirational Combinatorics
According to the Mathematical Association of America this morning, one purpose of the upcoming June/July issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society is
"…to stress the inspirational role of combinatorics…."
Here is another contribution along those lines—
Eidetic Variation
from page 244 of
From Combinatorics to Philosophy: The Legacy of G.-C. Rota,
hardcover, published by Springer on August 4, 2009
(Edited by Ernesto Damiani, Ottavio D'Antona, Vincenzo Marra, and Fabrizio Palombi)
"Rota's Philosophical Insights," by Massimo Mugnai—
"… In other words, 'objectivism' is the attitude [that tries] to render a particular aspect absolute and dominant over the others; it is a kind of narrow-mindedness attempting to reduce to only one the multiple layers which constitute what we call 'reality.' According to Rota, this narrow-mindedness limits in an essential way even of [sic ] the most basic facts of our cognitive activity, as, for example, the understanding of a simple declarative sentence: 'So objectivism is the error we [make when we] persist in believing that we can understand what a declarative sentence means without a possible thematization of this declarative sentence in one of [an] endless variety of possible contexts' (Rota, 1991*, p. 155). Rota here implicitly refers to what, amongst phenomenologists is known as eidetic variation, i.e. the change of perspective, imposed by experience or performed voluntarily, from which to look at things, facts or sentences of the world. A typical example, proposed by Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit (1927) and repeated many times by Rota, is that of the hammer."
* Rota, G.-C. (1991), The End of Objectivity: The Legacy of Phenomenology. Lectures at MIT, Cambridge, MA, MIT Mathematics Department
The example of the hammer appears also on yesterday's online New York Times front page—
Related material:
From The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy—
Eidetic variation — an alternative expression for eidetic reduction
Husserl's term for an intuitive act toward an essence or universal, in contrast to an empirical intuition or perception. He also called this act an essential intuition, eidetic intuition, or eidetic variation. In Greek, eideo means “to see” and what is seen is an eidos (Platonic Form), that is, the common characteristic of a number of entities or regularities in experience. For Plato, eidos means what is seen by the eye of the soul and is identical with essence. Husserl also called this act “ideation,” for ideo is synonymous with eideo and also means “to see” in Greek. Correspondingly, idea is identical to eidos.
An example of eidos— Plato's diamond (from the Meno )—
For examples of variation of this eidos, see the diamond theorem.
See also Blockheads (8/22/08).
Related poetic remarks— The Trials of Device.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Blue Note à Quatre
The Concert à Quatre "was Messiaen's last work, left unfinished on his desk at his death. His widow undoubtedly followed his wishes and style in completing the orchestration." —Leslie Gerber
Related material:
See also yesterday's Stone Junction, this morning's note on Heidegger 's Geviert, and Moulin Bleu from Beethoven's birthday, 2003—
Juliette Binoche in "Bleu"
Mathematics and Gestalt
"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty
when we see how the theorem 'fits'
in its place, how it sheds light around itself,
like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
Here Rota is referring to a concept of Heidegger.
Some context—
"Gestalt Gestell Geviert: The Way of the Lighting,"
by David Michael Levin in The Philosopher's Gaze
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Lubtchansky’s Key
William Lubtchansky, a cinematographer, was born on October 26, 1937, and died on May 4, 2010.
Yesterday's post included an illustration from this journal on the date of his death.
Here is a Log24 entry from last year on the date of his birth—
Monday, October 26, 2009 The Keys Enigma Related material: |
Clicking on the Shift Lock key leads to the following page—
—The Philosopher's Gaze,
by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999
Related images—
Detail from May 4 image:
Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:
(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)
See also Lubtchansky's Duelle and
Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, 2003.
Friday, January 29, 2010
More Glass
Part I:
"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds."
— Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (April 30, 2008), by Barbara Johnson
Part II:
Part III:
From the date of Barbara Johnson's death:
"Mathematical relationships were
enough to satisfy him, mere formal
relationships which existed at
all times, everywhere, at once."
– Broken Symmetries, 1983
X | ||
X | ||
X |
The X's refer to the pattern on the
cover of a paperback edition
of Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger.
Salinger died on Wednesday.
"You remember that book he sent me
from Germany? You know–
those German poems."
In Germany, Wednesday was
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2010.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Symbology
From this journal:
Friday December 5, 2008Mirror-Play of
the Fourfold For an excellent commentary View selected pages Play and the Aesthetic Dimension (Mihai I. Spariosu, Related material: – and Theme and Variations. |
Transition to the
Garden of Forking Paths–
(See For Baron Samedi)–
The Found Symbol
and Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida,
translated by Barbara Johnson,
London, Athlone Press, 1981–
Pages 354-355
On the mirror-play of the fourfold
Pages 356-357
Shaking up a whole culture
Pages 358-359
Cornerstone and crossroads
Pages 360-361
A deep impression embedded in stone
Pages 362-363
A certain Y, a certain V
Pages 364-365
The world is Zeus's play
Page 366
It was necessary to begin again
Monday, October 26, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Monday September 21, 2009
A Google search for "Das Scheinen," a very rough translation into Heidegger's German of "The Shining," leads to a song. A search for the English version of the song leads to a site with a sidebar advertising Pearl Jam's new (Sept. 20) album "Backspacer."
Happy birthday,
Stephen King.
Background:
Yesterday's entries
and the plot of
L'Engle's classic
A Wrinkle in Time.
(See this journal's entries
for March 2008.)
The Pearl Jam album cover art
is of particular interest in light
of King's story "Apt Pupil" and
of Katherine Neville's remark
"Nine is a very powerful
Nordic number."
Those who prefer more sophisticated
aesthetic theory may click on the
following keys:
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Saturday December 6, 2008
Abstraction and Faith On Kirk Varnedoe’s National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003): “Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself.”
|
et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt
… the mirroring …
is to be conceived of as
a shining forth, a play of mirror flashes,
as it were…. The four “mirrors”
emerge into presence as light
at the same time that they converge….
The above image:
Axes of Reflection
and Annunciation,
the latter being a detail
of a fresco by Giotto
on the cover of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Friday December 5, 2008
the Fourfold
For an excellent commentary
on this concept of Heidegger,
View selected pages
from the book
Play and the Aesthetic Dimension
in Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse
(Mihai I. Spariosu,
Cornell U. Press, 1989)
Related material:
the logo for a
web page—
— and Theme and Variations.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunday September 21, 2008
“… told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing”
— Quoted here Sept. 14
“We’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden.”
— Quoted here Sept. 10
“The woman introduced herself. ‘I am Mrs. Benjamin Rand. I am called EE by my friends, from my Christian names, Elizabeth Eve.’
‘EE,’ Chance repeated gravely. ‘EE,’ said the lady, amused. Chance recalled that in similar situations men on TV introduced themselves. ‘I am Chance,’ he stuttered and, when this didn’t seem to be enough, added, ‘the gardener.'” — Jerzy Kosinski, Being There |
Related material:
— Heinz Pagels,
The Dreams of Reason
— Janwillem van de Wetering,
A Glimpse of Nothingness
Monday, August 4, 2008
Monday August 4, 2008
Summer of ’36
Another Opening
of Another Show
“When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. We got our first wireless set that summer– well, a sort of a set; and it obsessed us. And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie– she was the joker of the family– she suggested we give it a name. She wanted to call it Lugh after the old Celtic God of the Harvest. Because in the old days August the First was La Lughnasa, the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh; and the days and weeks of harvesting that followed were called the Festival of Lughnasa.”
“Dancing at Lughnasa”
From the film “Contact”–
Jodie Foster and the
opening of the 1936 Olympics
“Heraclitus…. says: ‘The ruler whose prophecy occurs at Delphi oute legei oute kryptei, neither gathers nor hides, alla semainei, but gives hints.'” — An Introduction to Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press paperback, 1959, p. 170 |
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Saturday April 19, 2008
On April 16, the Pope’s birthday, the evening lottery number in Pennsylvania was 441. The Log24 entries of April 17 and April 18 supplied commentaries based on 441’s incarnation as a page number in an edition of Heidegger’s writings. Here is a related commentary on a different incarnation of 441. (For a context that includes both today’s commentary and those of April 17 and 18, see Gian-Carlo Rota– a Heidegger scholar as well as a mathematician– on mathematical Lichtung.)
From R. D. Carmichael, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (Boston, Ginn and Co., 1937)– an exercise from the final page, 441, of the final chapter, “Tactical Configurations”–
“23. Let G be a multiply transitive group of degree n whose degree of transitivity is k; and let G have the property that a set S of m elements exists in G such that when k of the elements S are changed by a permutation of G into k of these elements, then all these m elements are permuted among themselves; moreover, let G have the property P, namely, that the identity is the only element in G which leaves fixed the n – m elements not in S. Then show that G permutes the m elements S into
____________________
m(m – 1) … (m – k + 1)
This exercise concerns an important mathematical structure said to have been discovered independently by the American Carmichael and by the German Ernst Witt.
For some perhaps more comprehensible material from the preceding page in Carmichael– 440– see Diamond Theory in 1937.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Thursday April 17, 2008
(at Google News):
In other words:
|
Revelation for
April 16, 2008 —
day of the Pennsylvania
Clinton-Obama debate and
of the Pope’s birthday —
The Pennsylvania Lottery:
Make of this revelation
what you will.
My own interpretations:
the Lichtung of 4/13 and
the Dickung of page 441
of Heidegger’s
Basic Writings, where
the terms Lichtung and
Dickung are described.
See also “The Shining of
May 29” (JFK’s birthday).
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls:
A Tragi-Comedy