I have taken in a great deal of information over the past month or so and seemed time to step back and take yet another stab at my own current best-guess assimilation of this investigation. After contemplating Charles Sanders Peirce, a little Martin Heidegger and some John Dewey to boot, it seems that it is indeed best to identify three dimensions of reality. I will call them, “the material world,” “the living world,” and “the meaningful world.” These are far from original distinctions, but it is good to take a look at them anyway.

The material world includes non-living matter. The living world is the world of living things. The meaningful world is the world of meaningful ideas and emotions. The material world is the most fundamental. When elements of matter become arranged in certain complex ways something interesting happens to it. The non-living matter takes on a whole new spectrum of characteristics. These new characteristics are so fundamentally different that we make a huge distinction between matter that exhibit those characteristics and that which does not. The matter that exhibits these new characteristics we call living and the rest becomes by default non-living. (Not dead, because dead implies that something was living and then ceased to be alive.)

To me what is powerful is to see that “life” is a set of characteristics that are exhibited by some arrangements of matter. We could list some of the characteristics of living vs. non-living things but I think that we get the difference. Thinking of this in terms of emergence, these characteristics emerge out of the matter and become characteristic of the matter at the same time.

Now from the living world emerges the meaningful world. Again this new world emerges as a new set of characteristics that some arrangements of living matter begin to exhibit. The use of language might be one of these, the use of tools, storytelling, taking on names – we could probably go through and begin to identify these characteristics until we felt satisfied that we had them. Again the most interesting thing is to think about how these new characteristics arise right out of some arrangements of living matter. We could say that what has emerged is “mind” – not brain, lots of living things have brains that coordinate body functioning and movement. Let’s say that mind is whatever allows us to be aware of meaningfulness, not just events, or objects, but meaningful events or meaningful objects.

From reading John Dewey I picked up an interesting use of the word “as.” Dewey seemed to be implying that whenever you perceive of something “as” something, you perceive meaning. This can get tricky to talk about because for us meaning and perception are so totally intertwined that it is difficult to separate them.  If we are just seeing a white sphere with read marks on it, there is no meaning in that. You don’t yet know what I am talking about it. I haven’t conveyed the meaning. If we are seeing a “baseball” we are seeing a meaningful object. It is not just a white sphere with red marks – it is ball of very specific size, used in a specific game, that I have a specific history with (or not). If I say white sphere with red marks – not much hops into “mind.” If I say baseball a hole assortment of conscious and unconscious meanings and relationships spring into “mind.”

I believe that Charles Peirce was talking about this “mind” when he talked about thirdness, Heidegger talked about this “mind’ when he made the distinction of the “world” instead of the “universe” and this is the meaning that Dewey was attributing to mind.

Could it be that the physical science are only designed to deal with the “material world?” A discipline like Behaviorism designed to deal with the “living world?” and that other disciplines are designed for dealing with the “meaningful world?” How much difficulty in communicating comes from the fact that we mix up these different dimensions without taking that into account?

It is nice to learn from Graham Harman that his Bournemouth talk last year on Heidegger’s “origin of the work of art” essay has directly inspired this interesting forthcoming paper by Robert Jackson: “Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure.” That event was actually organised by Tammy Lu at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (since then  renamed as the Arts University College at Bournemouth), although I was the one who took this crazy photo of Graham:

Three days later Graham gave another talk on “The Greatness of McLuhan” at the Media School at Bournemouth University. We posted the recordings of both talks on this blog and they both became quite popular, however the Heidegger talk has the edge: it has been downloaded 1,027 times since 8 February 2008, as opposed to the 884 downloads of the McLuhan talk.

Strangely, both of these talks are more popular than Harman’s first lecture at the LSE  “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” on 29 November 2007, which has been downloaded 778 times, even though that was the event that launched the Heideggero-Latourian project most explicitly. I would have thought that the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Latour and the invocation of Latour’s concept of the plasma would be provocatively alluring (or alluringly provocative) enough to attract more attention. But the most popular Harman download (besides the respectable 1,688 downloads of the Harman Review itself) seems to be his “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda” from November 2008, with 1,385 downloads since then.

[Although I should hasten to add that these figures are somewhat misleading, as both the plasma talk and the Harman Review are also available on the LSE website, so probably just as many people if not more would have downloaded them from there. As for the DeLanda talk, it received a boost after being listed on Speculative Heresy.]

Jackson’s paper sounds very interesting though, so I’ll reproduce his abstract here:

Abstract for “Heidegger and the Work of Art History”

Session at Association of Art Historians (AAH) Annual Conference, April 15-17, 2010,

Glasgow, UK.

“Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure”

Robert Jackson BA (Hons)

School of Computing, Communications and Electronics

Art and Social Technologies

Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth.

In recent years the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has surfaced with a “realist” re-reading of Martin Heidegger‟s Tool-analysis, pushing it to its logical limits (Tool-Being – 2002). Dismissing Dasein as the root of truth for human beings, Harman instead argues that “Readiness-to-hand” and “Present-at-hand” are qualities available to all entities in the cosmos even if humans created such objects.

In January 2008 Harman‟s paper “On the Origin of the Work of Art (atonal remix)” attempts to perform an “object-oriented-philosophy” reading of Heidegger‟s influential essay on aesthetics, identifying Heidegger’s “strife” as a philosophical idea which escapes into the qualities of all objects and not just privileged artworks. But the extension of Heidegger’s strife hints to the idea of aesthetic “allure,” which Harman describes as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” “Allure” occurs when objects are split from their qualities, exhibiting tensions between its essence of “Being” and the way it has been described. Artworks, metaphors and jokes turn out not to be affecting features of human literary culture, but primordial constructions of the universe itself.

The paper will argue that these rich conceptualisations offer insightful commentary on technological artworks which utilise computational algorithms. I claim that artists such as John F Simon and Antoine Schmitt create generative and emergent aesthetic objects which display “allure” in all of their partial opacity, leading to the idea that technological artworks can propel vigorous independence, worlds away from superficial artificiality.

I hereby nominate this very clever octopus to the post of official mascot of object-oriented ontology. If there was any doubt that humans (and primates and ants and birds and so on) were not the only creatures that can use tools, then this should settle it. Even an invertebrate knows how to use tools. More than that, this octopus uses tools to build a dwelling, for the very practical and sensible reason of protecting and furthering its existence. As Heidegger put it, “Dwelling, however, is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist. (…) Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling.” (p. 158). If that’s the case, then it’s time perhaps to freshen up Heidegger a bit. Enough talk of man, how about octopus?

“What if octopus’s homelessness consisted in this, that octopus still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet, as soon as octopus gives thought to his [or her] homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling. ” [After Heidegger, p. 159]

Reference:

Heidegger, M. (1975). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, Harper & Row.

In my last two posts I introduced Peirce’s phenomenology of thirdness. The American Pragmatists were exploring a perspective of unified emergence that was taking the implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory into the realm of metaphysics. This work on emergence was continued in America by Alfred North Whitehead and Process Theologians to the present day.

Carl (our Behaviorist in residence) has effectively and admirably countered most of my complaints about behaviorism and tells us that Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism reincorporated the interior of consciousness that had been orphaned by some of the early Behaviorists.

In one of his last posts Carl was saying that some present day Behaviorists aim to find a way to measure thought. I am curious how they will try to measure thought? I assume that it will be through some physiological effect, but this is one of my lingering questions. If thoughts are reduced only to their physiological effects, are we missing something important? I believe that Peirce (and Heidegger) would say yes. The perceived meaning of thoughts is a higher emergence of reality that cannot be reduced to physiological effects at a lower realm of being. That is the basic principle of emergence; lower realms of being give rise to higher realms and the higher realms are dependent on, but not limited to the lower.

One of the classic thought experiments used by emergence thinkers is the common human ability to recognize faces. We are all able to recognize other people’s faces, but if you tried to create a computer program that could do the same you would find it impossible. No matter how many traits of human countenance you identify that can be in some way measured or codified and input into a computer, the computer would never be able to recognize faces with the effectiveness of the human mind.

Emergence thinkers say that this is because the human mind has the ability to take in the entire face and to make distinctions that can’t be reduced to identifiable and measurable traits. In the same way I find it doubtful that we will ever be able to take enough measurements of thoughts to reconstruct their meaning or to be able to unravel the complexities of human behavior. The original artificial intelligence explorers tried to simulate intelligence by collecting separate pieces of data for decades before stalling out. Similarly, I think that the model of the mind as the functioning of electro-chemical impulses in the brain – while certainly in many ways accurate and useful – will not be enough on its own to guide humanity into the future.

Our thinking needs to expand to take on more complexity and interconnectivity. We need to see the wholes that parts are connected to and recognize and work with subtle relationships that cannot be understood one at a time, but as whole interconnected systems. This was the kind of thinking that the American Pragmatists were pushing into. It was an evolutionary philosophy that conceived the universe as a whole that grew and was embracing a universe centered (kosmo-centric) vision of reality.

The next thing that I want to do is take Peirce’s ideas of thirdness and show how they were expanded upon by John Dewey whose philosophy was more socially oriented. In doing this I hope to be able to begin to create the vision of an emergent universe that I believe was held by the pragmatists and is at the heart of evolutionary philosophy and spirituality today.

I want to go in a little deeper into Peirce’s conception of the three modes of being, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. By Firstness Peirce is referring to pure being. Firstness is the unseen, imperceptible essence of things. It is the thing in itself prior to anything happening or any encounter with a second. As such, Firstness is also spontaneous, immediate and free because it is inherently unrelated to anything else that it could possibly be dependent upon, or bounded by. Here is Peirce’s own description of the nature of Firstness from his essay “A Guess at the Riddle.”

“The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence—that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.”

Secondness is pure experience, pure encounter with a first. Secondness is not unseen, it is pure seeing in the broad sense of experiencing or encountering. Secondness is, however, unknown. Secondness is the pure experience of a first and cannot include any thoughts or conceptions about either the first or the encounter with the first. Peirce thought of Firstness as the beginning and Secondness as the end.

Everything in between is Thirdness. Thirdness is the domain of mental phenomenon which are all the ideas and mental perceptions that we have that relate First essences with Second encounters. I have come to think of Peirce’s conception of Thirdness to be like the conception of “worlds” that was developed decades later by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger made a separation between the concept of “Universe” and the concept of “World.” Heidegger used the word Universe to represent the entire domain of objective things, in much the same way that the word is most often used today. The World (or Worlds) on the other hand was to Heidegger the domain of human meaning and significance that emerged from the human capacity for understanding. An example he used was a hammer. A hammer is not an object in the universe; it is a tool in the world. In the universe you might have a wooden shank with a shaped piece of metal on the end. That would be a meaningless object without significance. Put that same object in a human world, amongst people who can recognize its meaning and significance and it BECOMES a hammer that is used to bang nails into wood, and build houses and other things. The human world of meaning and significance is a world that is, to use Heidegger’s term, “disclosed” out of the universe. I would prefer to say that it emerges out of the universe in the presence of human intellect and culture.

I believe that what Heidegger was getting at in describing how human worlds of meaning and significance emerge, is more or less what Peirce was getting at with his conception of Thirdness. Look around you and see that everything can be stripped of all meaning and significance, all connection to usefulness or function, and it becomes a meaningless object, a shape in space and time. Reconnect it to its function and it discloses itself to be a “something” of value and worth to human beings.

To connect this idea with some of the things that we have discussed concerning the limitations of science, it was Heidegger’s belief that science is perfect for describing and explaining everything about the universe, but that it cannot describe or explain the world of human meaning and significance. The world of human meaning and significance is an emergent mode of being that cannot be built up from the objects of the meaningless universe alone. The “world” has evolved out of the universe and it is in the continued development of the “world” of human meaning and significance that is the domain of future evolution. It is our human ability to build and co-create the “world that gives us the ability for conscious evolution.”

…So I have considered gathering material for a book, entitled Contribution to the Theory of the Kiss, dedicated to all tender lovers. It is remarkable, besides, that no work on this subject exists. (Kierkegaard 350)

Just as Johannes—in his ambitious attempt to create a work of art through his development of the erotic with Cordelia—emphasizes the areas which philosophical discourse has closed off to its own inquiries, I would like to draw attention to the dismissal, or rather anathema, which philosophy has attached to marginal or subjugated orders of discourse, specifically: gossip.

The initial reaction to the term “gossip” can give us a clue into why it has been anathematized. This word does not have a univocal signification, connotation, or meaning. Its meanings multiply even as we use it. On a certain level, let us call it the level of conscience, gossip evokes a feeling of disapproval, even disgust. In this reaction, a valuation is attached to the word from the potential or “universal” perspective of the one about whom others are gossiping. On another level, an inquisitive one, gossip piques the interest because it evokes an idea of what is secret & sexual.

Is gossip a discourse? It lacks the fixity and coherence of what is typically considered to be a discourse. It slips away too easily. Some might dismiss it for being too girly. If so, and gossip is thereby banished from the halls of philosophy, then why have philosophers taken it seriously enough to write about it?

Possibly the most famous philosophical text on gossip is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927. The role of gossip in Being and Time, while not his central concern, is of some significance in its relation to the major concepts of the book. It is brought under the term “idle talk” [Gerede], which is one of the modes of falling.

In the investigation of the meaning of Being, it is necessary to determine the existential structure of Dasein, which is the being who is concerned about his or her being (that is, you and me). Heidegger describes this as a “possibility” which Dasein originally possesses: “That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as its ownmost possibility. In each case Dasein is its possibility…” (Heidegger 68). From out of this possibility emerge two “modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity” (Heidegger 68). The latter mode is actualized in fleeing, forgetting, and neglecting Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being by becoming lost in the amnesiac slumber of the “they.”

In its temporal modality, falling is revealed as getting caught up in what is happening in the present while (un)consciously neglecting how the present resonates with the future (and the past) in the temporalizing of temporality. The curious way in which temporality, which for Heidegger is different from time, works is expressed beautifully thus: “Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been” (401). Every moment is therefore a possibility for Dasein to grasp what is authentic to itself through the consideration of its connection with the future and the past rather than chasing after fashions. The highly moral nature of this distinction is evident in Heidegger’s language. In order to make this clearer, a connection may be drawn with Georges Bataille’s conception of evil in Literature and Evil:

The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future. Divine intoxication, to which the instincts of childhood are so closely related, is entirely in the present. In the education of children preference for the present moment is the common definition of Evil. (9)

(To be continued…)

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German philosopher Martin Heidegger addressed the central question of human existence full on, by examining how human self-awareness depends on concepts of time and death. His preoccupation with ontology – the form of metaphysical inquiry concerned with the study of existence itself – dominated his work. The central idea of his complex Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927) could be summed up in the phrase ‘being is’.

Man had to ask himself ‘what is it to be?’ and only by doing this, and standing back from absorption into objects and other distractions, could he actually exist. For Heidegger, the constant fear of death and the anxieties of life helped man to ask this central question – the mystery of life was intimately linked to the individual’s confrontation and consideration of the temporary nature of their own existence.

Heidegger also felt that art, like language, was important evidence of existence, something which was a real existence rather than a mere recreation of reality. He opposed technology, which he believed caused alienation, and advocated a return to an agrarian economy in which the individual had a greater role. For many Heidegger’s reputation is tainted by his association with Nazism in 1930’s Germany; he actively supported Adolf Hitler during the dictator’s first years in power and after World War II he was banned by the Allies from teaching and publishing for five years.

Despite this, his work has been widely influential, especially on the thought of twentieth century philosophical giants such as Sartre, Lacan and Derrida.

(Excerpt from bbc.co.uk)

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This is my attempt at being a philosopher. I was currently surfing and downloading porn when this ringing thought failed to get out of my mind. I just realized this a while ago. I do not know if any other person already realized this and published it and stuff. But, as Martin Heidegger wrote, being a philosopher is to strive to be attuned to what was permanently lost–which is the harmony of man to the totality of being. I would not try to discuss Heidegger’s arguments but I recommend that you read Being and Time.

Anyway, here is my what my correspondence with the Being revealed.

The assumption here is that objects that I consider to be existents are those who occupy (at least) the four dimensions–length, width, depth and time. This discussion will not touch upon that of things which exist in our minds, as a way of simplification. I consider here the geometric point of view, which states that three-dimensional objects consists of an infinite number of points. Each of these points occupy and infinitely small space but it occupies space nonetheless. Therefore, if an object consists of infinite units of these points, with each occupying and infinitesimal portion of space, then the object occupies an infinite amount of space! This means that, in essence, there are no boundaries for objects. An object cannot be limited in space.

But it can also be said that points are entities which have no dimension. This means that they do not exist in the three-dimensional world. But if points do not exist, then there would be no three-dimensional object at all. All objects, in some way then are figments of our imagination. Everything that we see the n are falsehoods. Their mere existence is a contradiction.

–posted by me on my blogspot account on 2 July 2009, at 8.55 pm.

http://newsfornoobs.blogspot.com/2009/07/of-points-and-infinites.html

For Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Philosophy. Thank you to Paul John Ennis for adopting this image.

Untitled
Pencil and gouache on paper
16cm x 27cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu

”When it comes to the ‘vertical’ relation between real objects and their accessibility to others, the real object is always something more than the  translated distortion through which it is encountered. That is why the real object is said to withdraw from all access, in a manner to which Heidegger alerts us better than anyone else. But the situation is different with the ‘horizontal’ relations between the two kinds of objects and their respective qualities. Here, the object is always less than the features through which it is known. For on the sensual level the tree has a core or eidos that cares nothing for the specific angle or degree of shadow through which it is grasped at any moment. And on the real level, the object is not fully green or smooth or brittle, but unites these traits in a specific and limited fashion, so that any quality is an exaggeration of sorts even with respect to real objects. In fact, we might say that both the real and sensual objects are completely unified, with all of their qualities compressed together in bulk: ‘thistreeness’, for instance. This unified quality becomes pluralized only by leaking off elsewhere into a different quadrant of reality. This can easily be seen from the intentional realm, where a tree is a vaguely grasped unity that becomes plural only through its specific appearance (accidents) or through an intellectual grasp of its most crucial features (eidos). Otherwise, a sensual tree or a wolf per se remain inarticulate blocks or vague feeling-things for the one who encounters them.”

Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009)

I’m back after having spent 2 days in Berlin for…work. Wow, that was exciting! Kein leisure this time!

The Ritz-Carlton was hosting the Herald Tribune conference of the luxury industry in Berlin. This conference has been traditionally hosted in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo. But this year Suzy Menkes, the venerable fashion editor of Herald Tribune, picked Berlin because the flirt between luxury and technology is becoming something serious. And surely Milano, Paris or London felt a bit passé when it comes to technology.

It was kind of odd to talk luxury in Berlin, the anti-luxury town. Or the über-luxury town, if you think that a cleaner air, using the bike and nature at your doorstep are the real luxury now. But Suzy Menkes has antennas, and they are tuning in on new themes: technology, CSR. After all the New York Times offers one of the best online media experiences, we started to see during the US election campaign how its Lab was exploiting all the potential offered by multimedia and the mixture of graphic/text/photo/interactivity. Plus the US are pushing smart grids, greener technology: sign of the times. And Berlin is a good example of sticking to environmental commitments.

Technology + luxury is indeed an intriguing combination and the concentration of interesting speeches and conversations provided abundant food for thought. Not all contributions were equally interesting. Some speakers lost golden opportunities for sharing with the audience a deeper understanding of their approach to technology because they picked a standard, institutional presentation off the rack and delivered it without too much belief, thus lowering the momentum generated by lush video introductions. Or because they never answered to questions but just kept on pumping their message “we’re the best”. But they were just a couple of them. The majority of the speakers had prepared the material carefully, both conversation and multimedia content, has delivered the key messages with passion and answered in a candid way to Suzy Menkes’s questions.

My favorite speeches…

1. Christopher Bailey, Creative Director @ Burberry like a dj mixed effective visuals and music, lots of it, with pragmatic examples and clear messages. He’s really in tune with the times. He shared with the audience in a simple way many examples on how the company is approaching technology in an holistic way: be it environmental issues in the workplace, permanent videoconference facilities, wifi and skype, online activities, approach to social networks, and feedback from social networks. It’s not a matter on jumping on the bandwagon of the latest cool gadgetry. But of having a vision on how that brand could profit from technology, preparing a plan and rolling it out. Not being afraid of engaging into a dialogue, not sticking to the brand monologue bunker-mentality.

2. Natalie Massenet, CEO @ Net-à-porter answered in a candid way even tough questions such as “what is the % of merchandise sold online that is returned?”. It is about 25%, but the fact you can do it without fuss lowers the barrier to entry and encourages shopping. She approached the theme of discounts and outlets with grace but without hiding the truth. Very elegant, very impactful. Or, as Menkes said, Multinational, multilingual, multimedia…

3. Jochen Zeitz, CEO @ Puma delivered a very inspired and quite intimidating speech on the social responsibilities of companies, or rather, the responsibility tout court of companies and customers alike vis a’ vis the environment. He sounded a bit like a priest and sometimes a dash paternalistic, putting himself on a level above the audience. But apart from the form, the substance of the speech was there. My impression is that he is truly committed and is working with the objective to making a difference, starting with a different way to use packaging for instance. No cosmetic CSR, but a clear vision. He may sound idealistic, but ideals are not a bad thing to have and I trust the man is pragmatic too – after all he’s German, right? – and we will see the results down the road. The speech was carefully prepared, even if it was delivered like a sermon. Maybe the audience could have been spared the many references to Heidegger and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but very inspiring and deep nonetheless. The guy is honest and means what he says.

4. Jefferson Hack, Editorial Director, Dazed & Confused – during the coffee break Hack was rehearsing his presentation. I love to see this. It means the speaker is taking the audience seriously and has worked personally on his presentation, is involved and cares about the product and the customers he has in front of him. Hack started off with a powerful video (and sound, hey!) and carried on with an extremely lateral-thinking form of presentation, and clear ideas on smart media. Similarly as with music, we will consume media online and “buy the paper” in the same way as we “buy the CD” or the vinyl now: for its artwork, as a souvenir of the experienced we consumed somewhere else, online. At the end he showed he cared for the audience, signaling that a bunch of links had been prepared were available forthose who wished to further explore the matter of smart media. Competent and thorough, but at the same impactful and effective, without trying to please the audience or the moderator by means of cheap seduction. Rough edges.

I crossed later Hack at Grill Royal and couldn’t agree more with him on the theme of higher quality magazines. I buy far less magazines today than I used to 10 years ago. But those ones I buy, are of better quality and deliver something more than just the news or the odd fashion editorial. Think about Dummy, Monocle, Brand Eins. And Vogue Paris, which I still buy because of its clean graphic look, extraordinary art work and articles which are not shallow.

5. Ross Lovegrove, Designer, Lovegrove Studio – was able to deliver a presentation which bordered more on the philosophical divertissement than on the clear description of the role of technology in luxury. But he had won the siberian slot, the one around 3pm, and managed to keep the audience interested and entertained during the toughest moment of any conference: digestion. Was it because he mentioned that during his career as a cook he managed to add marijuana to any dish? or because he was very tanned and laid back? He loathes retrospective, he hates looking back and he only works on future/futuristic stuff. Still, objects become icons – and sell – also because they have the magic of aging well, epitomizing the Zeitgeist of their time. One should not despise the source of his cashflows, oder?

6. During the same module Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter from Vexed dived deeper in the relationship between technology and the human body and discussed poignantly themes such as impact protection, moisture management, protection from pollution and visibility. We’re in smart materials territory, and the two bikers work on an array of projects also for other brands in order to develop materials with special properties and garments with ergonomic solutions to specific problems. I suggested to Adam to go and have a look to Otto Bock’s building across the road, an amazing buiding more fascinating than Prada’s Aoyama flagship in Tokyo…smart materials once more, with the difference that they deal with trauma recovery rather than avoiding trauma! Avant-après!

7. Alexander Reichert, Prada Transformer Project Architect, OMA together with Tomaso Galli from Prada. The Transformer is a fantastic giant toy and maybe you needed lateral risk-takers like the Pradas to make it a reality. Reichert’s project is a fantastic challenge which became real. On the one hand, I wonder about the financial implication and return of such a project. On the other hand, on paper it seems more interesting than Chanel’s cocoon-spaceship Art Container designed by Zaha Hadid, because it is truly innovative and capsizes, literally, the paradigm of building, making it truly…polyedric. Mongolian jurta, Eskimo boat, Indian Teepee, Scythian carriage, god knows how Reichert came up with the mega-toy. Reichert seemed quite shy (but very proud) in presenting his project, so some interesting slides got skipped because of his being maladroit. Tomaso’s communication skills were crucial in smoothing the creases. But as Reichert picked up a 3-d maquette of the Transformer things started to get better, he was more in control of the presentation and could share the 3-d idea behind it: a pyramid-shaped building morphing in a movie theater (rectangle), art exhibition (cross), special event (circle) and fashion event (octagon).….more tomorrow….

Photo: NYT – IHT

(Photo: Brittanica)

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival of ontology” …Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or “Human Being”… A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It’s the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” declaring that “the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law.”

More

Carlin Romano
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Sigmund Freud (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Pamela Thurschwell

Slavoj Zizek (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Tony Myers

Martin Heidegger (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Timothy Clark

Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Sean Homer

Friedrich Nietzsche (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Lee Spinks

Theodor Adorno (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Ross Wilson

Stuart Hall (Routledge Critical Thinkers) – Jamee Procter

Fun stuff from around:

• Short fiction online: Rebecca Lee’s “Bobcat.
• Book reviews: Ted Wilson on The Bible.
• Emanuel Faye drags Martin Heidegger back into the news.
• Lemony Snicket finds a new home.
• Breakfast serial: Del Rey will publish King/Straub novel The Talisman as a serial comic book.
• Book review: Speaking of Stephen King, Paul Constant has a few things to say about the newly released behemoth, The Dome.
• And speaking of Paul Constant … actually, no. You know what? I’m out.

And now, for absolutely no reason at all:

(I have no proper attribution for the above frame. If I discover the artist’s name, I’ll definitely include it here.)

-bd

Patricia Cohen’s article in the NY Times, “An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?” is another in a collection of recent hatchet jobs in the press (here and here) condemning the work of Martin Heidegger for his connections to the Nazis.

The occasion for these journalists writing about something they know nothing about is a book by Emmanual Faye, soon to be released in the U.S., claiming that Heidegger’s thought ought to be stricken from the canon because it was allegedly inspired by Nazism.

The articles consist of some “he said, she said” opinions about the matter with no discussion of the nature of Heidegger’s work. And Faye’s book has been widely discredited as itself a hatchet job. (see comments here)

I have no idea what inspired Heidegger. It is well known that he was a provincial German nationalist, probably an anti-semite, and an all-purpose jerk. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what this is supposed to tell us about his philosophy.

Heidegger’s main points, at least in his major work Being in Time, were that (1) our experience is always situated in a context of which we already have a non-cognitive (or non-representational) grasp prior to conscious deliberation, (2) that non-cognitive grasp is a product of the way things matter to us (care), (3) and ultimately how things matter to us must be understood in terms of our temporality (roughly our sense of past, present, and future). This view draws a sharp contrast with philosophical views that assume meanings are abstract, fixed entities without a history grasped primarily through theoretical reason. Heidegger’s ideas have found their way into the mainstream of philosophical thought and in fact have deeply influenced contemporary cognitive science.

I suppose one could interpret these ideas as meaning there is some sort of national destiny written into the “blood and soil” of a nation being disseminated through its history, and that the surge of “feeling” and “will” emanating from that destiny make reason irrelevant. Maybe Nazism flows from such an point of view. But it is a real stretch to find this in Being and Time–Heidegger’s works neither entail nor lend themselves to such a reading.

The genetic fallacy and the intentional fallacy are not necessarily incompatible with standards of good philosophical reasoning, but they must be handled with care—and neither Faye’s book nor the articles in question take the requisite care.

Heidegger’s limitations as a thinker (and perhaps a person) are revealed, not by what he said,  but by what he didn’t say. Moral relationships with other persons do not occupy a sufficiently central role in Heidegger’s thought. This is the source of much criticism of Heidegger, especially from thinkers such as Levinas, and to my mind the criticism is deserved. But that hardly makes his work an example of “Nazism” and is no argument for refusing to read Heidegger but, instead, for taking what insight one can and building a more adequate account.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

Martin Heidegger, Emmanual Faye, Heidegger and the Nazis

A New York Times book review of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy once again raises the old debate about Martin Heidegger’s Nazism. Can we distinguish the individual who gave intellectual defense to racial superiority, totalitarianism, and Hitler, from the philosophical contributions to existentialism and the mentorship of Marcuse, Arendt, and Gadamer?

Heidegger became a collaborator in the Nazi machine as rector of Freiburg University simultaneous with Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship in 1933. His address that year titled, “Self-Affirmation of the German University,” aligned his school with the Nazi Party, and his brief tenure (ended a year later, in 1934) moved the University closer in line with Party functions. Despite the brevity of his tenure, its impact was significant; during this period Heidegger was the one who enlisted the academy as a willing accomplice to Hitler, and all of the brilliance in the world cannot wash that stain from Heidegger’s body of work.

But, the question remains as to whether, if at all, academic philosophy needs to respond to Heidegger’s philosophical works through the fact of is collaboration with the Nazi party. This is a tricky thicket. If Being and Time were a defense of totalitarianism, particularly if it gained form in Hitler’s regime, it would be a far easier task. However, Heidegger’s philosophical contributions are ontological cornerstones of phenomenology and existentialism.

The suggestion to move Heidegger to Nazi history in library classification strikes me as an emotional, but perhaps misguided, reaction. Heidegger does stand out as a notable abettor of totalitarianism. Ideas cease being just ideas when they take the form of a dictator, a pogrom, a jackboot. But, Heidegger’s contributions that endure aren’t defenses of authoritarianism. The Heidegger alive in contemporary philosophy spurred on Derrida, Foucault, Arendt, Sartre, and Merlau-Ponty. Although the impulse to hold Heidegger accountable is well-grounded, it will necessitate a clear distinction between the person and the philosophy.