Freight and Salvage

Jonson & (Dr.) Johnson

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 09:26:55 -0400

Ben Jonson (Elizabethan dramatist, author of Volpone)

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Samuel Johnson (18th century poet, critic, Tory, author of the Dictionary and subject of James Boswell’s “Life”)

"In Berger’s book I also found this idea of ‘the silence of Vermeer’, which made me think: ‘why is it..."

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 05:42:39 -0400

“In Berger’s book I also found this idea of ‘the silence of Vermeer’, which made me think: ‘why is it silent?’ All paintings are silent. Yet I found sound in the Nicolaes Maes painting The Listening Housewife, or The Eavesdropper (1656), though in actuality there’s no sound – it’s my construction, it’s like creating a score for a music that doesn’t exist. There’s a link here with the distant music that James Joyce writes about, the music over the horizon that is the ungraspable phantom of life. That, in a sense, is the most appealing music.”

- David Toop in interview.

And here’s the mystery, the money that dares not speak its name, the untouchable secret: the...

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:37:48 -0400

And here’s the mystery, the money that dares not speak its name, the untouchable secret: the total capitalists’ wealth. What is it? Where is it? What’s happening to it? Who’s got it? And, most importantly, why is it always outside of the debate of what ‘we’ can afford, what ‘our’ governments can spend money on, ‘our’ deficit.

– Michael Rosen, The Billions We’re Not Allowed to Talk About

See also: ‘Budget 2012: UK companies are sitting on billions of pounds, so why aren’t they spending it?’, Philip Aldrick in The Telegraph.

actu philosophia

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:22:56 -0400

actu philosophia:

Entretiens, livres, etc.

Adorno und Horkheimer, über die Verschlingung von Mythos, Herrschaft und Arbeit, aus Dialektik der...

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:00:00 -0400

Adorno und Horkheimer, über die Verschlingung von Mythos, Herrschaft und Arbeit, aus Dialektik der Aufklärung:

“In einer homerischen Erzählung ist die Verschlingung von Mythos, Herrschaft und Arbeit aufbewahrt. Der zwölfte Gesang der Odyssee berichtet von der Vorbeifahrt an den Sirenen. Ihre Lockung ist die des sich Verlierens im Vergangenen. Der Held aber, an den sie ergeht, ist im Leiden mündig geworden. In der Vielfalt der Todesgefahren, in denen er sich durchhalten muβte, hat sich ihm die Einheit des eigenen Lebens, die Identität der Person gehärtet. Wie Wasser, Erde und Luft scheiden sich ihm die Bereiche der Zeit. Ihm ist die Flut dessen, was war, vom Felsen der Gegenwart zurückgetreten, und die Zukunft lagert wolkig am Horizont. Was Odysseus hinter sich lieβ, tritt in die Schattenwelt: so nahe noch ist das Selbst dem vorzeitlichen Mythos, dessen Schoβ es sich entrang, daβ ihm die eigene erlebte Vergangenheit zur mythischen Vorzeit wird. Durch feste Ordnung der Zeit sucht es, dem zu begegnen. Das dreigeteilte Schema soll den gegenwärtigen Augenblick von der Macht der Vergangenheit befreien, indem es diese hinter die absolute Grenze des Unwiederbringlichen verweist und als praktikables Wissen dem Jetzt zur Verfügung stellt. Der Drang, Vergangenes als Lebendiges zu erretten, anstatt als Stoff des Fortschritts zu benützen, stillte sich allein in der Kunst, der selbst Geschichte als Darstellung vergangenen Lebens zugehört. Solange Kunst darauf verzichtet, als Erkenntnis zu gelten, und sich dadurch von der Praxis abschlieβt, wird sie von der gesellschaftlichen Praxis toleriert wie die Lust. Der Gesang der Sirenen aber ist noch nicht zur Kunst entmächtigt. Sie wissen »alles, was irgend geschah auf der viel ernährenden Erde«, zumal woran Odysseus selbst teilhatte, »wie viel in den Ebenen Trojas Argos’ Söhn’ und die Troer vom Rat der Götter geduldet«. Indem sie jüngst Vergangenes unmittelbar beschwören, bedrohen sie mit dem unwiderstehlichen Versprechen von Lust, als welches ihr Gesang vernommen wird, die patriarchale Ordnung, die das Leben eines jeden nur gegen sein volles Maβ an Zeit zurückgibt. Wer ihrem Gaukelspiel folgt, verdirbt, wo einzig immerwährende Geistesgegenwart der Natur die Existenz abtrotzt. Wenn die Sirenen von allem wissen, was geschah, so fordern sie die Zukunft als Preis dafür, und die Verheiβung der frohen Rückkehr ist der Trug, mit dem das Vergangene den Sehnsüchtigen einfängt. Odysseus ist gewarnt von Kirke, der Gottheit der Rückverwandlung ins Tier, der er widerstand, und die ihn dafür stark macht, anderen Mächten der Auflösung zu widerstehen. Aber die Lockung der Sirenen bleibt übermächtig. Keiner, der ihr Lied hört, kann sich entziehen. Furchtbares hat die Menschheit sich antun müssen, bis das Selbst, der identische, zweckgerichtete, männliche Charakter des Menschen geschaffen war, und etwas davon wird noch in jeder Kindheit wiederholt. Die Anstrengung, das Ich zusammenzuhalten, haftet dem Ich auf allen Stufen an, und stets war die Lockung, es zu verlieren, mit der blinden Entschlossenheit zu seiner Erhaltung gepaart. Der narkotische Rausch, der für die Euphorie, in der das Selbst suspendiert ist, mit todähnlichem Schlaf büβen läβt, ist eine der ältesten gesellschaftlichen Veranstaltungen, die zwischen Selbsterhaltung und -vernichtung vermitteln, ein Versuch des Selbst, sich selber zu überleben. Die Angst, das Selbst zu verlieren und mit dem Selbst die Grenze zwischen sich und anderem Leben aufzuheben, die Scheu vor Tod und Destruktion, ist einem Glücksversprechen verschwistert, von dem in jedem Augenblick die Zivilisation bedroht war. Ihr Weg war der von Gehorsam und Arbeit, über dem Erfüllung immerwährend bloβ als Schein, als entmachtete Schönheit leuchtet. Der Gedanke des Odysseus, gleich feind dem eigenen Tod und eigenen Glück, weiβ darum. Er kennt nur zwei Möglichkeiten des Entrinnens. Die eine schreibt er den Gefährten vor. Er verstopft ihnen die Ohren mit Wachs, und sie müssen nach Leibeskräften rudern. Wer bestehen will, darf nicht auf die Lockung des Unwiederbringlichen hören, und er vermag es nur, indem er sie nicht zu hören vermag. Dafür hat die Gesellschaft stets gesorgt. Frisch und konzentriert müssen die Arbeitenden nach vorwärts blicken und liegenlassen, was zur Seite liegt. Den Trieb, der zur Ablenkung drängt, müssen sie verbissen in zusätzliche Anstrengung sublimieren. So werden sie praktisch. — Die andere Möglichkeit wählt Odysseus selber, der Grundherr, der die anderen für sich arbeiten läβt. Er hört, aber ohnmächtig an den Mast gebunden, und je gröβer die Lockung wird, um so stärker läβt er sich fesseln, so wie nachmals die Bürger auch sich selber das Glück um so hartnäckiger verweigerten, je näher es ihnen mit dem Anwachsen der eigenen Macht rückte. Das Gehörte bleibt für ihn folgenlos, nur mit dem Haupt vermag er zu winken, ihn loszubinden, aber es ist zu spät, die Gefährten, die selbst nicht hören, wissen nur von der Gefahr des Lieds, nicht von seiner Schönheit, und lassen ihn am Mast, um ihn und sich zu retten. Sie reproduzieren das Leben des Unterdrückers in eins mit dem eigenen, und jener vermag nicht mehr aus seiner gesellschaftlichen Rolle herauszutreten. Die Bande, mit denen er sich unwiderruflich an die Praxis gefesselt hat, halten zugleich die Sirenen aus der Praxis fern: ihre Lockung wird zum bloβen Gegenstand der Kontemplation neutralisiert, zur Kunst. Der Gefesselte wohnt einem Konzert bei, reglos lauschend wie später die Konzertbesucher, und sein begeisterter Ruf nach Befreiung verhallt schon als Applaus. So treten Kunstgenuβ und Handarbeit im Abschied von der Vorwelt auseinander. Das Epos enthält bereits die richtige Theorie. Das Kulturgut steht zur kommandierten Arbeit in genauer Korrelation, und beide gründen im unentrinnbaren Zwang zur gesellschaftlichen Herrschaft über die Natur.”

Thorstein Veblen, from The Higher Learning in America, ch. 3: “Men dilate on the high...

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:09:00 -0400

Thorstein Veblen, from The Higher Learning in America, ch. 3:

“Men dilate on the high necessity of a businesslike organization and control of the university, its equipment, personnel and routine. What is had in mind in this insistence on an efficient system is that these corporations of learning shall set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of the universities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that devolve on them. Yet when all these sophistications of practical wisdom are duly allowed for, the fact remains that the university is, in usage, precedent, and common sense preconception, an establishment for the conservation and advancement of the higher learning, devoted to a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. As such, it consists of a body of scholars and scientists, each and several of whom necessarily goes to his work on his own initiative and pursues it in his own way. This work necessarily follows an orderly sequence and procedure, and so takes on a systematic form, of an organic kind. But the system and order that so govern the work, and that come into view in its procedure and results, are the logical system and order of intellectual enterprise, not the mechanical or statistical systematization that goes into effect in the management of an industrial plant or the financiering of a business corporation.

“Those items of human intelligence and initiative that go to make up the pursuit of knowledge, and that are embodied in systematic form in its conclusions, do not lend themselves to quantitative statement, and can not be made to appear on a balance-sheet. Neither can that intellectual initiative and proclivity that goes in as the indispensable motive force in the pursuit of learning be reduced to any known terms of subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction. No scholar or scientist can become an employee in respect of his scholarly or scientific work. Mechanical systematization and authoritative control can in these premises not reach beyond the material circumstances that condition the work in hand, nor can it in these external matters with good effect go farther than is necessary to supply the material ways and means requisite to the work, and to adapt them to the peculiar needs of any given line of inquiry or group of scholars. In order to their best efficiency, and indeed in the degree in which efficiency in this field of activity is to be attained at all, the executive officers of the university must stand in the relation of assistants serving the needs and catering to the idiosyncrasies of the body of scholars and scientists that make up the university;(1*) in the degree in which the converse relation is allowed to take effect, the unavoidable consequence is wasteful defeat. A free hand is the first and abiding requisite of scholarly and scientific work.

“Now, in accepting office as executive head of a university, the incumbent necessarily accepts all the conditions that attach to the administration of his office, whether by usage and common sense expectation, by express arrangement, or by patent understanding with the board to which he owes his elevation to this post of dignity and command. By usage and precedent it is incumbent on him to govern the academic personnel and equipment with an eye single to the pursuit of knowledge, and so to conduct its affairs as will most effectually compass that end. That is to say he must so administer his office as best to serve the scholarly needs of the academic staff, due regard being scrupulously had to the idiosyncrasies, and even to the vagaries, of the men whose work he is called on to further. But by patent understanding, if not by explicit stipulation, from the side of the governing board, fortified by the preconceptions of the laity at large to the same effect, he is held to such a conspicuously efficient employment of the means in hand as will gratify those who look for a voluminous turnover. To this end he must keep the academic administration and its activity constantly in the public eye, with such “pomp and circumstance” of untiring urgency and expedition as will carry the conviction abroad that the university under his management is a highly successful going concern, and he must be able to show by itemized accounts that the volume of output is such as to warrant the investment. So the equipment and personnel must be organized into a facile and orderly working force, held under the directive control of the captain of erudition at every point, and so articulated and standardized that its rate of speed and the volume of its current output can be exhibited to full statistical effect as it runs.

William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 20: “In spite of the appeal...

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:44:18 -0400

William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 20:

“In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous—the cosmic times and spaces, for example— whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field PLUS its object as felt or thought of PLUS an attitude towards the object PLUS the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the “object” is when taken all alone. It is a FULL fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the KIND to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.”

George Orwell on Henry Miller, from ‘Inside the Whale’: “Evidently these books are of the sort to...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 08:05:00 -0400

George Orwell on Henry Miller, from ‘Inside the Whale’:

“Evidently these books are of the sort to leave a flavour behind them—books that ‘create a world of their own’, as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good books, they may be good bad books like Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories, or perverse and morbid books like Wuthering Heights or The House with the Green Shutters. But now and again there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared—for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you read certain passages in Ulysses you feel that Joyce’s mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller. Not everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in Black Spring, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy universe of the surresalists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. ‘He knows all about me,’ you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me’. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.”

Further down, Orwell recounts a passage from Black Spring:

“Henry gets a job with a melancholy Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in Le Havre with his friend Collins, the sea captain, goes to brothels where there are wonderful Negresses, talks with his friend Van Norden, the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in his head but can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the verge of starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry him. There are interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc., etc. And after all, none of it is true, the widow doesn’t even exist—Karl has simply invented her in order to make himself seem important. The whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these things are happening to you. And you have this feeling because somebody has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the real-politik of the inner mind into the open. In Miller’s case it is not so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the mind as of owning up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For the truth is that many ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in just the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the characters in Tropic of Cancer talk is very rare in fiction, but it is extremely common in real life; again and again I have heard just such conversations from people who were not even aware that they were talking coarsely.”

Stadtführung um Berlin als Hörspiel: Stadt im Ohr.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:25:00 -0400

Stadtführung um Berlin als Hörspiel: Stadt im Ohr.

Das tiefste Wesen der Religion offenbart der einfachste Akt der Religion – das Gebet –, ein Akt,...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:17:46 -0400

Das tiefste Wesen der Religion offenbart der einfachste Akt der Religion – das Gebet –, ein Akt, der unendlich mehr oder wenigstens ebensoviel sagt als das Dogma der Inkamation, obgleich die religiose Spekulation dasselbe als das größte Mysterium anstiert. Aber freilich nicht das Gebet vor und nach der Mahlzeit, das Mastgebet des Egoismus, sondem das schmerzensreiche Gebet, das Gebet der trostlosen Liebe, das Gebet, welches die den Menschen zu Boden schmettemde Macht seines Herzens ausdrückt.

Im Gebet redet der Mensch Gott mit Du an; er erklärt also laut und vernehmlich Gott für sein anderes Ich; er beichtet Gott als dem ihm nachsten, innigsten Wesen seine geheimsten Gedanken, seine innigsten Wünsche, die er auBerdem sich scheut, laut werden zu lassen. Aber er äußert diese Wlinsche in der Zuversicht, in der Gewifiheit, daß sie erfüllt werden. Wie konnte er sich an ein Wesen wenden, das kein Ohr für seine Klagen hatte? Was ist also das Gebet, als der mit der Zuversicht in seine Erfullung geaüßerte Wunsch des Herzensl Was anders das Wesen, das diese Wunsche erfüllt, als das sich selbst Gehor gebende, sich selbst genehmigende, sich ohne Ein- und Widerrede bejahende menschliche Gemüt? Der Mensch, der sich nicht die Vorstellung der Welt aus dem Kopf schlagt, die Vorstellung, daß alles hier nur vermittelt ist, jede Wirkung ihre natürliche Ursache hat, jeder Wunsch nur erreicht wird, wenn er zum Zweck gemacht und die entsprechenden Mittel ergriffen werden, ein solcher Mensch betet nicht, er arbeitet nur; er verwandelt die erreichbaren Wünsche in Zwecke weltlicher Tätigkeit, die übrigen Wünsche, die er als subjektive erkennt, unterdrückt er oder betrachtet sie eben nur als subjektive, fromme Wünsche. Kurz, er beschrankt, bedingt sein Wesen durch die Welt, als deren Mitglied er sich denkt, seine Wünsche durch die Vorstellung der Notwendigkeit. Im Gebete dagegen schließt der Mensch die Welt und mit ihr alle Gedanken der Vermittlung, der Abhangigkeit, der traurigen Notwendigkeit von sich aus; er macht seine Wünsche, seine Herzensangelegenheiten zu Gegenständen des unabhängigen, allvermögenden, des absoluten Wesens, d.h. er bejaht sie unbeschränkt. Gott ist das Jawort des menschlichen Gemüts – das Gebet die unbedingte Zuversicht des menschlichen Gemütes zur absoluten Identität des Subjektiven und Objektiven, die Gewißheit, daß die Macht des Herzens größer als die Macht der Natur, daß das Herzensbedürfnis die allgebietende Notwendigkeit, das Schicksal der Welt ist. Das Gebet verändert den Naturlauf – es bestimmt Gott zur Hervorbringung einer Wirkung, die mit den Gesetzen der Natur im Widerspruch steht. Das Gebet ist das Verhalten des menschlichen Herzens zu sich selbst, zu seinem eigenen Wesen – im Gebete vergißt der Mensch, daß eine Schranke seiner Wünsche existiert, und ist selig in diesem Vergessen.

The man who does not exclude from his mind the idea of the world, the idea that everything here must be sought intermediately, that every effect has its natural cause, that a wish is only to be attained when it is made an end and the corresponding means are put into operation – such a man does not pray: he only works; he transforms his attainable wishes into objects of real activity; other wishes which he recognises as purely subjective he denies, or regards as simply subjective, pious aspirations. In other words, he limits, he conditions his being by the world, as a member of which he conceives himself; he bounds his wishes by the idea of necessity. In prayer, on the contrary, man excludes from his mind the world, and with it all thoughts of intermediateness and dependence; he makes his wishes, the concerns of his heart, objects of the independent, omnipotent, absolute being, i.e., he affirms them without limitation.

– Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, Kapitel 13: ‘Die Allmacht des Gemüts oder das Geheimnis des Gebets.’ (English translation)

Auflistung der Schriften, Fragmente und Vorlesungen Hegels, alphabetisch nach Titel geordnet Hegels...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:01:00 -0400

Auflistung der Schriften, Fragmente und Vorlesungen Hegels, alphabetisch nach Titel geordnet

Hegels Gesammelte Werke (= Akademie-Ausgabe)

Um was für eine Identität oder auch »Gleichheit mit sich selbst« handelt es sich dabei?...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:03:00 -0400

Um was für eine Identität oder auch »Gleichheit mit sich selbst« handelt es sich dabei? »Begriffloses Sprechen« [1] mißversteht diese Identität derart, daß alles Seiende so mit sich selber gleich ist, daß es zugleich nicht etwas anderes, sondern ungleich mit anderen, von Anderem verschieden ist. Dabei wird jedoch die idealistische Einsicht übergangen, daß alles Seiende immer schon »Subjekt« bzw. »Begriff« ist. Denn es wird als mit sich identisches Seiendes in seinem bestimmten Begriff gedacht, es wird mit der Bedeutung seines bestimmten sprachlichen Ausdrucks gleichgesetzt. Daß es mit sich selber gleich ist, heißt dann jedoch primär, daß ein bestimmter Begriff, eine bestimmter Gedanke oder auch eine bestimmte Bedeutung eines sprachlichen Ausdrucks sich in ihm – dem Seienden – auf sich selber bezieht. […] Man kann diese Selbstbeziehung des Begriffes in der Substanz auf sich auch so kennzeichnen, daß das »Ansich« der substantiellen Gegenstände, d.h. ihre unabhängige Existenz gegenüber dem Bewußtsein und dessen Begriff, in das »für sich« desselben übergeht, nämlich in eine Beziehung, in der das Bewußtsein den an sich existierenden Gegenstand als seinen eigenen Begriff von ihm weiß, d.h. al einen »Begriff«, der für es »zugleich ein Seiendes« ist [2], so daß ein derartiger »Begriff« den Unterschied zu seiner an sich existierenden Substanz in sich selber enthält.

[1] Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede, §54 (“Dadurch überhaupt, daß, wie es oben ausgedrückt…”), TA 53.

[2] Phänomenolgie des Geistes, B. IV. B. ‘Freiheit des Selbstbewußtseins’, TA 156.

Aus: Wilhelm Lütterfelds, ‘Die analytische Trivialisierung Hegelscher Dialektik – am Beispiel des Spinoza-Satzes’, Hegel Jahrbuch 2004: Glauben und Wissen, zweiter Teil.

It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience; to our...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:32:00 -0400

It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience, and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

Henry James, The Art of Fiction.

Älgarnas Trädgård.

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:22:33 -0400

Älgarnas Trädgård.

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1914.

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:18:00 -0400

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1914.

Claes Oldenburg. The finished work done with Coosie van...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:12:00 -0400

Claes Oldenburg. The finished work done with Coosie van Bruggen.

In 2005 the availability in Victoria of the defence of provocation was curtailed and a new offence...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:42:00 -0400

In 2005 the availability in Victoria of the defence of provocation was curtailed and a new offence of defensive homocide was created.

In the 1990s Marjorie Osland and her son David Albion had sought to rely on the defences of provocation and of self-defence, after killing Osland’s “cruel” and “tyrannical” husband Frank. Osland was sentenced in the Supreme Court to 14 and a half years in prison, her appeal to the High Court was dismissed.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) advocated resistance to the terrorization and torture of women by their male partners, and in places advocated killing as part of that resistance.

Saturn.

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:28:00 -0400

Saturn.

Minotaur by Charles S. Pierce. (More digitized works by...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:08:00 -0400

Minotaur by Charles S. Pierce. (More digitized works by Pierce.)

Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, II.iv: So that here, instead of saying that the belief or...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:34:31 -0400

Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, II.iv:

So that here, instead of saying that the belief or knowledge is got by putting together and comparing the simple apprehensions, we ought rather to say that the simple apprehension is performed by resolving and analysing a natural and original judgment. And it is with the operations of the mind, in this case, as with natural bodies, which are, indeed, compounded of simple principles or elements. Nature does not exhibit these elements separate, to be compounded by us; she exhibits them mixed and compounded in concrete bodies, and it is only by art and chemical analysis that they can be separated.