Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
"A monument honouring Manitoba's missing and murdered women and girls is unveiled and blessed in Winnipeg on Tuesday."
--- from The Star
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Excerpt (p 9) from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (a seminar-lecture course from 1929/30) by Martin Heidegger:
Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire into beings as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners, are thereby also included in the question, placed into question.
Accordingly, fundamental concepts are not universals, not some formulae for the universal properties of a field of objects (such as animals or language). Rather they are concepts of a properly peculiar kind. In each case they comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts [Inbegriffe]. Yet they are also comprehensive in a second sense which is equally essential and which ties in with the first: they also in each case always comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein [i.e., there-being]---not as an addition, but in such a way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in the second sense, and vice-versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophizing existence. Metaphysical thinking is comprehensive thinking in this double sense. It deals with the whole and it grips existence through and through.
Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire into beings as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners, are thereby also included in the question, placed into question.
Accordingly, fundamental concepts are not universals, not some formulae for the universal properties of a field of objects (such as animals or language). Rather they are concepts of a properly peculiar kind. In each case they comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts [Inbegriffe]. Yet they are also comprehensive in a second sense which is equally essential and which ties in with the first: they also in each case always comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein [i.e., there-being]---not as an addition, but in such a way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in the second sense, and vice-versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophizing existence. Metaphysical thinking is comprehensive thinking in this double sense. It deals with the whole and it grips existence through and through.
Monday, August 4, 2014
From The Animal Side (2007; translated 2011) by Jean-Christophe Bailly, p. 14-15:
"And yet, sometimes a silent animal looks up at us and silently looks through us."
[-- Rilke, from the eighth of the Duino Elegies]
[...]
The world of gazes is the world is signifiance ["the term signifiance refers to the semiotic modalities and processes of making and conveying meanings" (p. 80)], that is, of a possible, open, still indeterminate meaning. For the percussive impact of difference that is produced by discourse, the gaze substitutes a sort of dispersal: the unformulated is its element, its watery origin. The gaze gazes, and the unformulated is, in it, the pathway of thought, or at least of a thinking that is not uttered, not articulated, but that takes place and sees itself, holds itself in this purely strange and strangely limitless place which is the surface of the eye.
Thus it is even among humans, who compensate, however, through discourse for this lack of determinacy and of articulation. But among animals, the absence of language means there is no compensation for the lack, and this is why their gaze is so disarming when it settles on us, which happens, as Rilke's line says, sweetly and soberly. In the face of that which is and can only be for us neither question nor response, we experience the feeling of being in the presence of an unknown force, at once supplicating and calm, that in effect traverses us. This force may not need to be named, but where it is exercised it is as though we were in the presence of a different form of thought, a thought that could only have ahead of it, and overwhelmingly, the pensive path.
This pensivity on the part of animals, in which some have been willing to see only stupor, is in any case made manifest in a thousand different ways, according to species, individuals, and circumstances. It seems to me that certain people have seen this, have approached it, and that others, who may have glimpsed it, have turned away at once. There are important and serious divisions here.
"And yet, sometimes a silent animal looks up at us and silently looks through us."
[-- Rilke, from the eighth of the Duino Elegies]
[...]
The world of gazes is the world is signifiance ["the term signifiance refers to the semiotic modalities and processes of making and conveying meanings" (p. 80)], that is, of a possible, open, still indeterminate meaning. For the percussive impact of difference that is produced by discourse, the gaze substitutes a sort of dispersal: the unformulated is its element, its watery origin. The gaze gazes, and the unformulated is, in it, the pathway of thought, or at least of a thinking that is not uttered, not articulated, but that takes place and sees itself, holds itself in this purely strange and strangely limitless place which is the surface of the eye.
Thus it is even among humans, who compensate, however, through discourse for this lack of determinacy and of articulation. But among animals, the absence of language means there is no compensation for the lack, and this is why their gaze is so disarming when it settles on us, which happens, as Rilke's line says, sweetly and soberly. In the face of that which is and can only be for us neither question nor response, we experience the feeling of being in the presence of an unknown force, at once supplicating and calm, that in effect traverses us. This force may not need to be named, but where it is exercised it is as though we were in the presence of a different form of thought, a thought that could only have ahead of it, and overwhelmingly, the pensive path.
This pensivity on the part of animals, in which some have been willing to see only stupor, is in any case made manifest in a thousand different ways, according to species, individuals, and circumstances. It seems to me that certain people have seen this, have approached it, and that others, who may have glimpsed it, have turned away at once. There are important and serious divisions here.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
From The Animal Side (2007; translated 2011) by Jean-Christophe Bailly, p. 4:
Speaking of animals. I have become aware, stratagems and efforts notwithstanding, that declarations of intense feeling on the subject of animals quite often not only fall flat but give rise to a sort of embarrassment, rather as though one had inadvertently crossed a line and gotten mixed up in something untoward, or even obscene.
Speaking of animals. I have become aware, stratagems and efforts notwithstanding, that declarations of intense feeling on the subject of animals quite often not only fall flat but give rise to a sort of embarrassment, rather as though one had inadvertently crossed a line and gotten mixed up in something untoward, or even obscene.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Click to see full image.
This strikes me as a funny picture.
From Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Another excerpt (p 21) on philosophy and philosophizing from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (a seminar-lecture course from 1929/30) by Martin Heidegger:
Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend] and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy. We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept [Begriff], man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack [Angriff]---driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Da-sein [there-being] in man launches the attack upon man. Thus man in the ground of his essence is someone in the grip of an attack, attacked by the fact 'that he is what he is', and already caught up in all comprehending questioning. Yet being comprehensively included in this way is not some blissful awe, but the struggle against the insurmountable ambiguity of all questioning and being.
Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend] and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy. We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept [Begriff], man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack [Angriff]---driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Da-sein [there-being] in man launches the attack upon man. Thus man in the ground of his essence is someone in the grip of an attack, attacked by the fact 'that he is what he is', and already caught up in all comprehending questioning. Yet being comprehensively included in this way is not some blissful awe, but the struggle against the insurmountable ambiguity of all questioning and being.
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