Félix Ravaisson, Selected Essays (NDPR review)

This book looks incredibly interesting: link HERE.

Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (NDPR review)

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)

Putting below excerpts which characterize the review overall hopefully saving the reader time in looking at the review as a whole. Link to the review in its entirety is after the excerpts.

Rush begins by noticing the developments in the academic discussion of German romanticism that have taken place over the last twenty years. Once mostly the province of literary scholars, the field of German romanticism also came to acquire in this period remarkable new interest within the Anglophone philosophical world. 

One question raised by this new philosophical attention, of course, is just what is meant by "romanticism"... 

Rush is particularly interested in what is now usually characterized as "early" German romanticism, a term employed above all to distinguish between pre- and post-Napoleonic phases of German romanticism and centering (depending on how one counts these things) on the small town of Jena and the years 1796-1801. Although the ambit of even this more restricted cultural phenomenon involves a fairly wide constellation of figures (Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Schlegel, etc), Rush keeps his focus on three main authors: Friedrich Schlegel, who emerges at the center of Jena romanticism; Hegel, who came to Jena late and whose idealist approach is often taken simply to be in opposition to romanticism; and Kierkegaard, whom Rush sees as offering a kind of synthesis that is both responsive to and critical of its romantic and Hegelian sources. 

[...] 

The key term for Rush's consideration of romanticism within its own development and in relation to idealism is the romantic figure of irony. His argument here is that a proper understanding of the romantic notion of irony lies behind post-Jena philosophical developments from Hegel to Kierkegaard. On this view, Schlegelian irony is seen less as a poetic mode than a primary way of exploring subjectivity: Rush's stress is on Schlegelian irony in the context of individual agency and what he calls the "first-personal sense of lived regulative cognitive and cultural orientation." 

Hegel's notion of dialectic in this context is understood as having an "uncomfortable proximity" to Schlegel's sense of irony, although Rush thinks the Hegelian system must be characterized as "retrospective and autotelic" in contrast with the Schlegelian system of fragments which is "prospective and tentative" (p. 10). On Rush's view, Hegel might be seen as a sort of "irresolute romantic," one who tries to nail down philosophical stability too soon and at a cost to the chaos that Schlegel can take on; the "really resolute romantic" would be one who denied the sort of resolution that Hegel craves. 

The book's two long chapters on Schlegel and Hegel are followed by a shorter chapter that presents Kierkegaard as offering a synthetic view. As Rush argues, Kierkegaard's "controlled" notion of irony allows him both to make use of Hegel's line of critique against Schlegel and to employ Schlegelian resources in turn against Hegel. Key here is Kierkegaard's notion of "spheres of existence" (aesthetic, ethical, religious) and the transitions among them.

Link to review HERE.

Outside Thought: Meillassoux, Uexküll, Peirce

A very interesting thesis is, to what extent might rationality - and all that is included along with conceptual navigation and the implementation of that navigation, including inference-making and judgment - be extrahuman as much as it is human?  While such activity is found immanent within human consciousness there is a sense in which it is immediately other than human consciousness: already "outside" of it, already part of "the great outdoors."  In the below linked paper the author turns to  the semiotic thought of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll vis-a-vis Quentin Meillassoux in order to flesh out notions of radical alterity and perception which are, perhaps, always and already other-than-self.  This is to say that the radical alterity in question is already outside as much as it is inside.

The practical upshot of such a notion is that perhaps there is more of a continuity than supposed between human and nonhuman by way of (natural) semiotic expression and communication, with modes of reasoning and acts of natural semiotic articulation allotted more broadly to who, or more essentially what, is actually capable of such acts - this without necessarily claiming that such acts are of a strictly "mental" or immaterial nature (thus "subjectalism" and the reading upon the world explicitly human traits or features).  Here it is possible to see that rationality, encompassing semiotic expression and communication, is of course not a strictly human affair and may be more deeply embedded in the world than once supposed, part of perceptual universes other-than-the-human but equally capable of complex conceptual navigation, inference-making, and judgment.  The result is that while the conceptual is part of the world this is not to say that the world is at bottom conceptual.  In a very strange way, then, the very notion of what "consciousness" means, what "perception" means, and what "reasoning" means - changes to the benefit of de-leveling any anthropocentric privilege formerly granted to explicitly human forms of consciousness, perception, and reasoning. Following Hegel, the real is rational and the rational real. Nature does not just affectively express, it reasons. And humans are but a small part of that.

Finally, I should say that while there is certainly much, much overlap ontologically and cosmologically between C.S. Peirce and Meillassoux, most profoundly on the issue of the necessity of contingency, the virtual and the possible in the role of counter-factuality and logic of possible Worlds (an "immanence" of the World beyond), set-theory's use in the advancement of arguments purporting not only the necessity of chance but the statistical formation of "universal" "figures" generally accrued over the long-run through a kind of habit-formation of the universe, and a Hegelian eschatological hope for a future World of justice and community albeit a tempered hope due to the Schellingean motor of reality which being the only absolute seems to forever forestall such an eschatological completion, that semiotics would be another ground upon which these two philosophers seem to converge.  Even in seeing speculation an alternative to dogmatism and criticism, spurred on by acts of abduction or "retroduction" and the function of a "metaphysics-of-the-open," of speaking not of what is but rather only what can be, is enough to warrant any side-by-side comparative study of these two philosophers extremely productive and of immense fruitful benefit.

To that end this paper is a welcome, illuminating step.

"Outside Thought: Meillassoux, Uexküll, Peirce"

Eric Savoth (UC Berkeley)

Abstract

This paper considers Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of a “great outdoors” to consciousness in light of the semiotic thought of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll. Meillassoux argues that philosophies proposing a correlation between human thought and the world cannot account for the existence of the universe before human life. According to Meillassoux, this state of the universe is radically other to human consciousness. With the help of Uexküll and Peirce, I revise the role Meillassoux assigns to the universe before living beings emerged. I argue that not only the universe before living beings, but also the logic of life itself is radically other to human consciousness.

Link HERE.

Our visit to the Heidegger cabin (Heidegger's hut)

PHOTO: Niemoczynski, 2017.
Arriving to the top of Todtnauberg

A few days ago Na and I had the pleasure of visiting Martin Heidegger's cabin located in the mountains of the Black Forest region of southern Germany. Built in 1922, the small three room cabin (often referred to as "die Hütte" or "the hut") was where Heidegger wrote many of his most famous books, including Being and Time (written in 1927).

Plans showing the evolution of the C.S. Peirce house

My impression of the cabin and surrounding area was one of awe and wonder. Like when visiting the house of C.S. Peirce in Milford, Pennsylvania a few years ago, I was able to see how the contours of a philosophy can be very much the product of where that philosophy was created.  For example, Peirce's home was a project of continual re-construction and addition with Peirce adding new levels and rooms to the home frequently.  The home itself was ordered in its design and its layout block-like in orientation; lean yet ornate at the edges at the same time.  Peirce's philosophy was much the same: systematic yet speculative and exploratory at the edges; subject to continual revision and re-construction in such a way that the old was always incorporated into the new.  In a way, one can see the ideas of a speculative evolutionary philosophy, a cosmological metaphysics of morphe', present in the continual expansion and change of the design and building of the Peirce home.

Heidegger's cabin is simple yet quite romantic in its austerity; connected to the surrounding rustic, idyllic valley of fields and forests in a way that is quite indescribable.  Even Na remarked how the surrounding Black Forest had a magnetism to it; a certain charm of magic and air of mystery which draws one closer wondering what lies ahead in those dark woods.  The valley itself is quaint with its rolling hills, green pastures, and a rural village which abuts the forests.  I could see Heidegger's ideas spelled out in this landscape, especially essays like "Why I Stay in the Provinces" written in 1934 or "Conversations Along a Country Path" written in 1944. I can see how many have taken up Heidegger's thoughts on place and space, dwelling and thinking, mortals and gods, while looking at how his writings may have been affected by writing in the cabin.

Directions to the Heidegger hut or Heidegger cabin are quite simple although it is generally off limits to visitors to see up close due to its location on private property.  Na and I were granted access just by chance however as we ran into an immediate family member who happened to be there during a German holiday (I imagine that if you do find someone who owns the property or someone who knows a family member that they'd let you see it up close as long as you ask).  So in that respect we were extremely lucky to see it up close as we were expecting only to see it from a distance along the path.

The cabin is located in Todtnauberg with the path leading to it (the "Heidegger Rundweg") beginning at the center of the village.  The path in its entirety takes about 90 minutes to walk although the cabin itself is visible from the path after about ten or so minutes of walking.  Many locals come to the path (which is owned by the town, only its adjoining fields are privately owned) to walk and enjoy the scenery.

We traveled by train from Heidelberg which took about four hours, stopping to change trains in Rastatt, then Offenburg, and then taking a bus from Kirchzarten (a very nice small village itself) to Todtnauberg.  Our bus took us up several steep forested mountainsides where there are a few resorts and ski places, a nature center, and then fewer and fewer remote mountain villages. Once on top of the mountain Todtnauberg appears (on a map part of "Todtnau") which is very, very small and consists mainly of farm houses and a few small hotels.

PHOTO: Niemoczynski, 2017.
Sign for the Heidegger Rundweg, town center

There are signs pointing to the path and one walks uphill to its beginning which takes about fifteen minutes from the center of town. From there the path goes uphill slightly until after another ten to fifteen minutes of walking you'll see the cabin on top of a hill to your left.

The hill to the cabin is quite steep so be sure to wear sturdy shoes or have a friend that can help you climb up. During our visit the field grass was thick and it was extremely muggy out making the climb somewhat difficult. We ascended along side a stream whose water helped keep us cool on such a hot day. After a few minutes of climbing the hill we finally reached our destination which was awe-inspiring to see up close after having read and written about Heidegger for so many years.

 As you can see in the photos I will post below, it is quite beautiful.  The views from the front of the cabin are stunning - and a little ways from the cabin toward the front at a crest there is a wooden bench where you can sit and take in the scenery.

It is certainly a trip that has changed the way I see Heidegger's writings.  A very powerful experience for sure, I'd recommend it to anyone who currently or has in the past taken interest in Heidegger's philosophy and would like to see where some of his most profound ideas were generated.

Click on photos to see larger image. (All photos were taken by Niemoczynski June 2017.)

Heidegger Rundweg, looking back to beginning of path

Panoramic shot of valley

View of cabin from the bottom of the path

About ten to fifteen minute walk along the path, base of hill to cabin

View of the cabin at hill summit

Front of cabin

View from the front steps of the cabin

Front view

Right side view

Water pump about 20-30' from cabin side

Side of cabin, cut wood is stacked along its side

View of valley from the top of the hill

View of valley to the left

Another small path leads from the cabin side to the paved path below

Cabin atop the hill, stream runs in cut shown in middle of photo

Another view of cabin, top

Building maintained by family member, to the left, base of hill

Valley view exiting path back to town

Iain Hamilton Grant: "Deleuze is a Fichtean, that is my thesis..." (quote of the day)

Encountered the below as I began sketching out the range, problems, concepts, and figures from whom I plan to draw (and those I plan to critique) in the book I am writing this summer. Title? Either Speculative Naturalism or Transcendental Naturalism. Not sure yet.

Title aside, in addressing Grant and Brassier (and others) Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Deleuze will be making their appearances.

In similar vein I discovered a revealing running commentary on Kant and Hegel written by Nick Land which I plan to use as well. Will post that as a quote of the day, hopefully soon enough.

"The most profound attempt to articulate linguistic sovereignty over a non-linguistic cosmos is Fichte's. It is profound because in his quest to do so he eliminates a priori any question of a cosmos which is not fundamentally logically constituted, by which I mean constituted from the position of the constitutor – from the Ich that posits. This is not as it were an absolute Ich, this is just an Ich that posits….All that he is ultimately interested in is that constitutive position as subjectivity, but linguistically or logically, in order to articulate whatever cosmos can be articulated at the cost of the elimination or reduction, as far as possible, of the actual cosmos. I thought that this was ingenious actually, and I spent some time working through how Fichte does this, and its basically the Ich and the nicht Ich, these two are inseparable and are always in some sort of tension; but the tension can always be reduced to near zero by means of the Ich's fundamental colonization of the space of the nicht Ich. So, all that is required is that wherever I come across something that shocks me, I simply insist that it was mine all along. And that's essentially the linguistic paradigm. There is no difference between that and a metaphysics as it were that shuts its gates where language apparently has limits; although where language has limits is a bizarre question to ask insofar as presumably, as far as it is asked, it is linguistically constituted as a constitution of the cosmos. 

Now, that same Fichtean moment, I think you find it in Deleuze. You find it expressly in Deleuze's relationship to Plato. There's an extraordinary series of passages in Difference and Repetition where he says the time to overcome Platonism has come, but the question of what Platonism is has elided us save only for a few caveats that Plato is not a Platonist – there were no Platonists after Plato. But the question is what is Deleuze doing with Plato? And we find this out in Logic of Sense where he situates Plato as the materialist wise enough to invert the order of the normative with respect to the ontological….So what Deleuze is, is a Fichtean. You can back this up I think by looking at the reception of German idealism in France. France has been dominated by Fichte, there is a constant influence of Fichte there. So Deleuze is a Fichtean, that is my thesis…. 

The real reason why I argue this is because in Difference and Repetition you'll find Deleuze saying the present inquiry must accommodate all the categories of nature and freedom. But why are there two sets of categories, why the split? Where are there a set of categories for nature and the other for freedom? And in what does Deleuze's materialism consist if he acknowledges this pre-categorial split as it were, between nature and freedom?…Here you have precisely the recipe for the categories of nature without the need for Fichte at all. [But] Deleuze celebrates the tradition of German idealism for their discussion of the auto-positing concept [of the categories]. So I don't think it's too much of a reach actually to see the dominance of the ontological as being the precursor to the dominance of the ontological over the normative." 

- Iain Hamilton Grant

"It is to the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and the object that Johanne Fichte, in his philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life, no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act – it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posited in a life…. A life is the immanence of immanence, Absolute immanence…." 

- Gilles Deleuze "Immanence: A Life"

The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (NDPR review)

Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, Northwestern University Press, 2015, 372pp., $34.95 (pbk), IBSN 9780810130760.
Reviewed by Gary E. Aylesworth, Eastern Illinois University

In this volume, Andrew J. Mitchell examines the fourfold (das Geviert) as the key to Heidegger's later thinking. This motif is introduced for the first time in the Bremen Lectures of 1949 (which Mitchell translated into English), in reference to the thing as a gathering of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. Mitchell extends this conception of the thing as a gathering of relations to show that the later Heidegger steps beyond his treatment of things in Being and Time, and that he conceives things, not just Dasein, as ecstatically open and exposed to one another in the mirror-play of the world.
For Mitchell's reading, it is crucial to understand the technological essence (das Gestell) as...


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Ecology of Affect: Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters

Interesting Open Access book publication Ecology of Affect: Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters for download which discusses the background of new materialism and some recent theoretical developments concerning affect, time, sensation, ecology, economy, technology, and politics.  Simondon, Deleuze, Peirce, Meillassoux make their conceptual appearances as well.

“The way we conceive the human today is particularly affected by the shifts in media technology during the 20th century. Affect emerges as the new liminal concept that renders the body compatible in novel ways with the technology and politics of media. By ways of a relational reorganization the organic end technological life is condensed in a new, intense way to an ecology of affects.”

English edition
Translated by Gerrit Jackson
Preface by Felicity Colman
Publisher meson.press, Lüneburg, Apr 2017
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783957960955
68 pages

Monoskop dowload page HERE.

Phenomenology and naturalism?

Two links to a topic I've been thinking about lately. 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672559.2017.1332674?needAccess=true&journalCode=riph20 

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/49272-phenomenology-and-naturalism-examining-the-relationship-between-human-experience-and-nature/

quote of the day

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent–be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

— Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang

Podcast with Ray Brassier and Markus Gabriel - "Matter and Mind: Is Consciousness Inexplicable?" (mp3 download)

From The Institute of Art and Ideas, part of the podcast Philosophy for Our Times. HERE.

Hegel iPhone case

A solution for how you might accomplish your Hegel reading while at parties, as presented in the second screen-shot.

TFW you're having a great time at a cool party and suddenly someone whips out their Hegel pic.twitter.com/mP7IZ3zn2s

— Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs) April 1, 2017

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