As Rilke once told him, being born on a
Leap Day was like "falling through a crack in time," so that four years
of life counted only as one, thus giving him access to "a kingdom
independent of the ordinary changes we mortals have to suffer." --
"Balthus," The Independent, 20 February 2001
02/29/2008
Falling through a crack in time...
02/22/2008
Alles gute zum geburtstag, Arthur Schopenhauer!
It is Rousseau's opinion that the proper way to avenge an insult is, not to fight a duel with your aggressor, but to assassinate him -- an opinion, however, which he is cautious enough only just to indicate in a mysterious note to one of the books of his Emile. -- A.S., The Wisdom of Life
01/11/2008
Domine, labia mea aperiēs, etc., etc.
Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: 'Nimirum hac die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.' [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived. -- Macrobius, Saturnalia]
The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a
philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do
not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and
powers are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things
indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond
that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does
on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the
resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to
any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play,
which is indubitably the hardest (Erasmus, Apophthegmata,
V). In all the rest he can wear an actor's mask: those fine
philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us
may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance
serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself
there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we
must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:
Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast.
The mask is ripped off: reality remains. -- Lucretius]
That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients [Seneca]) the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart. -- Montaigne, Essays, 1:19
Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity? But if we do not call the dead man happy, and if Solon does not mean this, but that one can then safely call a man blessed as being at last beyond evils and misfortunes, this also affords matter for discussion; for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants....
Now many events happen by chance, and events differing in importance;
small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly do not weigh down
the scales of life one way or the other, but a multitude of great events
if they turn out well will make life happier (for not only are they themselves
such as to add beauty to life, but the way a man deals with them may be
noble and good), while if they turn out ill they crush and maim happiness;
for they both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even
in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many
great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility
and greatness of soul.
-- Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1:10
I am Dynamite
At the end of a philosophical discussion that had tormented two professors from the University of Graz for decades and had brought not only them but also their families to total ruin and which, as they are reported to have perceptively told a third colleague one day, like all philosophical discussions led to nothing and which, finally, in the nature of things, ruined and actually drove this colleague, who had also become embroiled in their discussion, insane, the two professors from Graz, after inviting their third colleague and adversary, out of habit, so to speak, into the house they had rented jointly for the sole purpose of their philosophical discussion, had blown the house up.
They had spent all the money they had left on the dynamite necessary for the purpose. Since the families of all three professors were present in the house at the time of the explosion, they had also blown up their families. The surviving relatives of one of the professors and adversaries, for whom the decades-long philosophical discussion -- as they themselves had clearly demonstrated -- had proved fatal, considered suing the state because they were of the opinion that the state's moral and intellectual bankruptcy had driven all three to their deaths, but they did not bring such an action after all, because they realized the futility of such action. -- "Consistency," Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator
01/09/2008
The Entrance to Hell
The most intelligent and famous female poet that our country has produced in the present century died in a hospital in Rome from the effects of scalds and burns that she must have sustained in her bathtub, according to the authorities. I used to go on trips with her, and on these trips I shared many of her philosophical views, as well as her views on the course of the world and the course of history, which had frightened her all her life. Many attempts on her part to return her native Austria, however, came to grief because of the shamelessness of her female rivals and the stupidity of the Viennese authorities. The news of her death reminded me that she was the first guest in my then still completely empty house. She was always on the run and had always seen people for what they really were, as a slow-witted, stupid, thoughtless mass that one simply has to break with. Like me, she had early in life discovered the entrance to hell, and entered this hell even though there was a danger of perishing in this hell at a very early age. People are trying to decide whether her death was an accident or whether it was suicide. Those who believe in the poet's suicide keep saying that she was broken by herself, whereas in reality and in the nature of things she was broken by her environment and, at bottom, by the meanness of her homeland, which persecuted her at every turn even when she was abroad, just as it does so many others. -- "Rome," Thomas Bernhard, in The Voice Imitator
12/23/2007
Boredom
Genuine boredom has not yet arrived if we are merely bored with this book or that movie, with this job or that idle moment. Genuine boredom occurs when one's whole world is boring. Then abysmal boredom, like a muffling fog, drifts where it will in the depths of our openness, sucking everything and everyone, and ourselves along with them, into a numbing sameness. -- Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?
12/19/2007
Following the path
The thought of Brice Parain is disconcerting first of all because it is centered upon some infinitely simple truths and because, almost immediately, even before they are told to us, it offers an account of the impossibility of stating them in a direct way: he must follow the path of error to the end where we completely lost these truths.
The first [of these simple truths] is that man does not exist without
language because language has created him; the second is that in order
to fulfill his purpose or simply to maintain his current state, he must
perform his acts in solidarity with his speech; finally, the third is
that as soon as he transgresses the speech "of his mouth" he destroys
his existence and abandons his human specificity....Parain insists that
individual consciousness is animated by its subjection to the movement
of language and is thereby made only to follow the universal movement
of consciousness." -- Pierre Klossowski, "Language, Silence, and
Communism," in Such a Deathly Desire
12/11/2007
I Know the Truth
I know the truth -- give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look -- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
-- "I Know the Truth," Marina
Tsvetaeva, 1913
12/09/2007
The essence of poison is nothing poisonous...
Or...that all philosophy today begins in gossip:
"There is something further we must reflect upon. Must the killing by the cave-prisoners necessarily result, as it did with Socrates' cup of hemlock, in a physical death? Is this not also symbolic? Is the process of physical death the hard thing? Not rather the actual (actual, I say) constant presence of death before one during existence? And again, not just death in the physical sense of dying, but the forfeiture and rendering powerless of one's own essence? No philosopher has been able to avoid the fate of this death in the cave.
"That the philosopher is delivered over to death in the cave means that philosophy is powerless within the region of prevailing self-evidences. Only in so far as these themselves change can philosophy have its say. Today, in the event that philosophers did exist, this fate would be more threatening than ever. The poisoning would be far more poisonous, because more concealed and devious. The poisoning would happen not through visible external damage, not through attack and struggle such that the possibility of real resistance would remain, the possibility of measuring strength, thus of liberation and heightening of power. The poisoning would happen by becoming interested in the cave-philosophers, such that everyone says to one another that these philosophers must be read, such that one hands out prizes and honours within the cave, such that one gradually creates a newspaper and magazine fame for the philosopher, and admires him.
"Today, the poisoning would consist in the philosopher being pushed into the circle of those who are interesting and about whom one writes and gossips, those in whom, within a few years, certainly no one will any longer be interested. For one can interest oneself only in something new, and only as long as others do so too. The philosopher would in this way be quietly killed, made harmless and unthreatening. While still alive he would die his own death in the cave.
"And he must put up with this. He would misunderstand himself and his task were he to withdraw from the cave. Being-free, being a liberator, is to act together in history with those to whom one belongs in one's nature. He must remain in the cave with the prisoners, and with those who count down there as philosophers. Neither may he withdraw into an ironic superiority, for in this way he would still participate in his own poisoning. Only by becoming master of such ironic superiority would he be able to die a genuine death in the cave.
"Plato attained this high level of existence in his old age. Kant bore something of this highest freedom in himself. Poison and weapons for death are indeed ready today. But the philosopher is lacking, because today there can at best be more or less good sophists, who at best prepare the way for the philosopher who will come." -- Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth
11/24/2007
Kata-strophe
Brassier has a particular end in mind. This is the inexorable fact
of extinction, the polemical pivot of this book:
“[T]he earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billion years hence; all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate.”
For Brassier, these facts are of central philosophical import. In his view, because extinction is the inevitable fate of existence, in logical time it has already occurred. “The subject of philosophy is already dead,” Brassier writes, “and ... philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.”
Brassier’s basic claim is epistemological. In his understanding, humanity ultimately has no intrinsic value, and it is the duty of rational thought to embrace this fact. “[E]xistence is worthless,” he writes, “and nihilism is ... the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality which ... is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.” -- Daniel Miller on Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound (Palgrave, 2007), sample chapter available here
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