Saturday, 31 March 2018

Wednesday, 28 March 2018

Monday, 26 March 2018

Sunday, 25 March 2018

Tuesday, 20 March 2018

Thought 608: Four Ideas (1)


(1)

Artistic intention
need not be the 
source of truth
in a work of art,
because artists
are the 
mediators
rather than
creators of
of that which
inspires them.

(2) 

Com-ments
belong to 
to mentalism.

(3)

Many a
modern
workplace
is a cult.

(4) 

The Magician
of Messkirch
was not yet
an occultist.

Monday, 19 March 2018

Thought 607: Economic Growth—A Contradiction in Terms


The economical cannot grow
because to economise
means to spare,
to preserve.

economic growth = uneconomic waste

Sunday, 18 March 2018

Thought 606: National Socialism—A Contradiction in Terms


National Socialism is an oxymoron
because Socialism has to be
international to fight capital
that is itself international.

Saturday, 17 March 2018

Thought 605: Reading the Self


Reading the Self
means understanding
that the thoughts we have
of others and things 
have to do with us.

Friday, 16 March 2018

French 5: Commentaire sur le livre « Qu'appelle-t-on penser ? » de Martin Heidegger



Oeuvre phare quoique négligée du grand corpus heideggerien

Qu'appelle-t-on penser ? est un cours que Heidegger dispensa dans les années cinquante, soit une bonne décennie après la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale. 

Hannah Arendt y vit une importante clé de voûte dans l'oeuvre conséquente et riche de cet auteur-professeur-philosophe très controversé.

Contenant deux parties, la première partie s'attache à éclairer la pensée de Nietzsche, en particulier l'oeuvre Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra — Un livre qui est pour tous et qui n'est pour personne , et son cri: 
« Le désert croît : malheur à celui qui qui abrite le désert ! »

; — Heidegger le précise, le désert dans le Sahara africain n'est qu'un type de désert.

Cette partie comporte une importante analyse du surhomme, déjà anticipée dans les années trente durant sa confrontation avec Nietzsche, ainsi que sa différence avec le dernier homme ; en réalité, le surhomme n'est pas un superman ou une extension de l'homme traditionnel mais simplement l'homme qui s'est affranchi de l'esprit de vengeance, « du ressentiment contre le temps et son « il était » », qui diminue tout, qui ne cherche qu'à punir et qui cligne de l'oeil au lieu de penser.

Mon propre travail en tant que penseur m'a mené à l'observation suivante : le surhomme est l'homme qui va au delà de l'animal raisonnable (du latin animal rationale), vers l'animal qui pense son habituation (voir En français 2: L'habitation et la maîtrise du monde).

La deuxième partie du cours consiste en une fastidieuse et pénétrante analyse d'un fragment de Parménide ; une connaissance de l'alphabet grec est ici préférable. 

Il s'agit de savoir en quoi la vérité peut-t-elle se manifester dans l'ère de la technique moderne (y compris cette page internet).

Conclusion : c'est une oeuvre riche et pleine d'innocence et de subtilité qui dit la même la chose, plus ou moins, que Être et temps, mais en beaucoup moins de mots. 

Recommandé à tous les amateurs de la pensée !

Thursday, 15 March 2018

Thought 604: Eighteen Ideas


(1) 

Art is the universal 
medicine—we have
art lest we perish
from the truth.

(2) 

Politics is philosophical
to the extent that it thinks,
and philosophy is political
to the extent that it seeks
to establish trust in
its favour.

(3) 

'Now tell us what you think about this:
Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
But Jesus knew their evil motives.
"You hypocrites!" he said.
"Why are you trying to trap me?
Here, show me the coin used for the tax."
When they handed him a Roman coin,
he asked, "Whose picture and title are
stamped on it?"
"Caesar's," they replied.

"Well, then," he said, 
"give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,
and give to God what belongs to God."'

(Un)Holy Bible

New Testament, 
Matthew 22:17–21

It is the same powers
that coin and tax—
we cannot have
one without
the other.

 (4)

Money has trust
in its favour,
unlike ideals.

(5) 

Almost everything under the sun
can be given a sexual reading.
This is the source in fact 
of many a joke.

(6) 

Let us not underestimate the relative
reliability and permanence to life
modern technological conditions afford us,
including as compared to the moods 
and vagaries of humans themselves.

(7) 

It is clear today that the social game of
networks, connections, and alliances
is heavily tied in with money and power,
including the very possibilities of
employment and earning a living,
as evidenced by the ubiquitous
expression, 'it's not what you know,
but who you know that matters.'

(8) 

One of the charms of learning foreign languages
as an adult is that it enables one to relive a second
childhood as it were of word acquisition, in so far
as we will proceed from basic words to more conceptual ones,
and from simple constructions to more complex ones. 

(9) 

Collusions between the elite and the mob to
police thought do not bode well for philosophers
who, in any case, are a tiny minority 
at the best of times,
and have been subject, historically, 
to waves of persecution, depending
on the (lack of) quality of 
the consciousness 
of their time.

Exertion as combining pathology at the top
and at the bottom was subtly highlighted
by director Stanley Kubrick in his film
A Clockwork Orange,
as indicated by the film 
analyst Rob Ager.

[Van Gogh's Prisoners Exercising]

[Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange]

(10) 

If philosophy is the friendship of wisdom,
and wisdom is the application of understanding, then
philosophy is the friendship of applied understanding.

(11) 

Books that offer recipes for success,
as conventionally understood,
tend to sell better than books offering
the long road to wisdom.

(12) 

To know oneself
is most of all to grasp
the relation of the 'I' to the 'me',
one that I have called 'conscience',
the perceiving of perception
and the knowledge of knowing,
which is to say: apperception.

(13) 

'Life as the yield of life.—
No matter how far a man may extend himself
with his knowledge, no matter how objectively he
may come to view himself, in the end it can yield 
to him nothing but his own biography.'

—Friedrich Nietzsche,

Human, All Too Human—A Book for Free Spirits,
Volume I, 9. Man Alone with Himself, §.513

Bio-graphy is indeed, 
etymologically speaking,
the writing of life.

(14) 

Not existence but co-existence 
is what makes life tricky,
due to the fact that 
'it is hard to be good'
(χαλεπὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι)
and that 'the majority are bad'
(οἱ πλεῖστοι κακοί)—
as two ancient
statements put it.

(15) 

The rule of the economic (οἰκονομική)
over the entire spectrum of society
can only serve to erode the political (πολιτικά),
because the latter demands a public space for
the freedom of speech and deed among equals
that is not that of the οἶκος, the household,
which belongs to the private sphere of necessity.

(16) 

Negative interactions with close ones can sometimes
outweigh many months of good interactions with them
depending on the intensity of the disagreement,
because when one is pained from hurt,
one seeks a cause and someone to blame, 
whereas the neutral and jolly is taken for what 
it is and requires no confrontation.

(17) 

Both statism and capitalism are religions.
In fact, they are cults in so far as one cannot
readily escape either without coming a cropper,
all the more so that they feed into each other
as mutually reinforcing forces where
the former, statecraft, can be viewed as the 
death-pledge to careless security, and the latter, 
capital, as the mort-gage with numbered money.

(18) 


The confession by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho,
one that ultimately, in his own words, 'meant nothing', 
showcases a certain self-transparency on his part that is
indicating of a grain of integrity, at least in so far as he does 
admit to his true apathic nature, both to us the viewing
audience at the beginning and to his own lawyer at the end.

Tuesday, 6 March 2018

Thought 603: A Note on Mulholland Drive


COWBOY
A man's attitude... 
a man's attitude goes some ways 
toward how a man's life will be. 
Is that something you agree with?

ADAM
Sure.

COWBOY
Now... 
did you answer cause you thought 
that's what I wanted to hear 
or did you think about what I said 
and answer cause you truly 
believe that to be right?

ADAM
I agree with 
what you said... 
truly.

COWBOY
What did I say?

ADAM
That a man's attitude 
determines to a 
large extent how 
his life will be.

COWBOY
So since you agree 
I guess you could be a 
person who does not 
care about the good life.

ADAM
How's that?

COWBOY
Well, just stop for a little 
second and think about it. 
Will ya do that for me?

ADAM
Okay, I'm thinking.

COWBOY
No. You're too busy being 
a smart aleck to be thinkin'. 
Now I want you to think and 
quit bein' such a smart aleck. 
Can you do that for me?

ADAM
Look... Where's this going? 
What do you want me to do?

COWBOY
There's sometimes a buggy. 
How many drivers 
does a buggy have?

ADAM
One.

COWBOY
So let's just say I'm driving this buggy 
and you fix your attitude and 
you can ride along with me.

***

The Cowboy can be 
read as being David Lynch 
telling the audience in the
form of the smart-aleck 
director Adam to fix their
attitude as to the film 
and to ride with 
the buggy-driver,
the Director, on the
journey of Mulholland
Drive.

Monday, 5 March 2018

Thought 602: Nature & Nurture


It is nature
that determines
nurture.

Sunday, 4 March 2018

Thought 601: Medication v Medicine


Medication that treats symptoms is lucrative,
unlike medicine that cures causes.