Decembers

about Heidegger's "Being and Time"

Martin Heidegger is known for his published work in existential, ontological, and phenomenological philosophy.  He consistently argued that Western philosophy had gone astray since the Greeks' initial exploration of the nature of being. Heidegger sought to return us to everyday being, re-examining it to rediscover it.

His best-known book, Being and Time, is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. To learn more about Heidegger, I read the following:

• Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt
• A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time" by Michael Gelven
• Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Being and Time is reputedly difficult to read and understand because of the subject matter and because Heidegger's writing style, terminology, vocabulary, and personal creativity are so unconventional. Because Heidegger has such a reputation, I sought guidance from Richard Polt's introduction and Michael Gelven's commentary. First I read Polt, then Gelven and Heidegger's Being and Time at the same time.

Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt

Richard Polt's introduction is a very high-level glance at Heidegger's philosophy. Polt begins by paraphrasing some of the German philosopher's big questions: What is being? What is the meaning of being? What is the being of abstract things, and how is abstract being different from ours? Don't expect big answers from Polt.

Polt recounts Heidegger's view that we are profoundly historical, so we're in a different philosophical time from the Greeks, which means we have different understandings and ways of conceiving. Heidegger rejects any claim that being is projected or constructed. Being is a complicated phenomenon we actually live, and we live different modes of being at various times. The modes Heidegger looks for are not perceived through the senses. No, they are intuited. For example, imagine a green apple. The question of being does not concern the color itself, but the mode of existence in which a thing is being colored. Polt moves around Heidegger's concept of being without going into any depth.

In Being and Time, Polt says, Heidegger is at least partially attempting to understand how theoretical truth is rooted in our lived existence; Heidegger is rooting an ontological theory of being out of a phenomenological examination of living. Polt offers quick takes of Being and Time but his summaries, brief and easily read though they are, offer very little of the substance of the book.

Michael Gelven's commentary and Heidegger's Being and Time

Gelven opens his commentary with a philosophical point of reference for the reader: Heidegger, Gelven explains, worked contrary to neo-Kantians (however, he was in the Kantian tradition). This is important in that neo-Kantians practiced a science-centered philosophy whereas Heidegger is using a phenomenological examination of real life for ontological ends. Now, Being and Time.

Whether or not we exist is not a question for Heidegger. At least, not in Being and Time. We know we exist. But what does it mean to be? We sense our own being. Perhaps we know of it implicitly, but seem unable to articulate what we mean when we say, I exist. Heidegger wants to make explicit that vague sense we have of being, and perhaps answer some unasked questions in the process (Is the world a reality that we're just a part of? Or are we central to our own story?). The fact of Being and the meaning of Being are the same thing.

Heidegger disagrees with modern philosophical traditions that hold being as essentially a meaningless term, so broad as to encompass everything and so nothing. There is more to be said of being than that it is merely self-evident. But this inquiry is not merely a task for Science because ontology is even more fundamental than anything within Science's purview. Being scientific is merely a mode of being (in which you, for example, study things that can be verified). Science presupposes Being. So, this is a task for philosophy. And, more specifically, it is a task for ontology. This is important: ontology comes before metaphysics, which investigates reality and asks what is. Ontology is asking what is is.

Quickly, Heidegger singles out our Being, human Being, as unique because our Being is the being which can consider and look after its own being. And he calls our Being Dasein. Only Dasein can do this. We can also consider other selves, and have a sense of the presence of other selves; to this end, we are not completely separate from others.

Heidegger breaks human Being down into its most basic parts, which he calls existentials. These parts are a priori--they are always there no matter what experience you have. Being in the world is probably about as basic as it gets. It is the first and most general awareness we have. We are always more or less aware of being in a world and relating to our surroundings; when we conceive of ourselves, we do so with some reference to time and space. And this worldly reference precedes all knowledge, for there must be a world in which objects of knowledge can occur and be encountered, and in which cause and effect can occur. The world is already there when we start down the path of metaphysics.

Our most basic relationship with this world is that we use it. We relate to the world almost always with ends in mind. The possible ends, our possibilities, precede any actuality (possibility precedes actuality). This using-the-world is what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand, and it is another crucial existential. Consider: We use the doorknob to open the door (so that we may pass through (and go get in the car (and drive to the store (to buy groceries for dinner))); we do not encounter the doorknob as an entity with its own thing-hood unless we are purposefully deliberating and complicating our world, imposing data on it. And even doing nothing is a way of relating to the world.

If you're bored out of your mind and just lie in bed, you're doing something because you have to be doing something; you are constantly making the present. Our lived existence is the possibilities before us, the next present (or the hoped-for present, two days from now); what you're doing now is for what you will have done, will own or part with, or will be doing in the future. The world is a future world for us. Our understanding allows us to (implicitly) understand that we have possibilities and act on those possibilities. So possibilities--the various ways in which we can exist--allow us all our thinkings and doings. What already is the case does not hold us back. (But we can create rules or templates of thinking that in turn limit us; for example, the rules of reasoning comes afterwards, and those rules prevent us from being able to imagine a circular triangle. Our cognitive power precedes reason, so reason is not a priori.) Being-able-to-be is part of the structure of our being.

This part is key: The experience we have being in the world, considering and working through possibilities is the stuff of being human. So Dasein--our Being--is living and thinking possibilities that are ways of relating to the world in which we have been thrown and about which we have a disposition toward. This inevitable and unavoidable disposition we have toward the world (of possibles) manifests in us what Heidegger calls Care. Care, in Heidegger's philosophy, unifies all the existentials. Care is the Being of Dasein. To care is to be ahead of yourself already involved with the world.

So all the above refers to ways of Being, but not to the meaning of Being. The meaning becomes clearer when we consider death.

Death shows us that not-being is possible. Furthermore, only the possibility of death has meaning; the actuality of death does not. The possibility of not-being--which is more philosophically important than the eventually of our not-being--reveals our temporality, which triggers an awareness of time.

So, Dasein's Being is Care; and the meaning of Care is temporality, or time. Heidegger is not asking, What is time? because that is a metaphysical question; instead, he is asking, What does it mean to be in time? Time springs from our temporality. We can only care because there is a future. And the future is not something arrived at; it is always future. Same goes for the past. The past is always past. To put it in grammatical form, you did not drive to work this morning; you are having-been-driving-to-work this morning, and therein is the meaning of the past. And the future is always the possibilities you are always toward. I am as coming toward. The present is making present, it is what you are doing. Time is not a series of nows; it all happens now. The past is meaningful because it exists. Had it passed us somehow, it would not exist, and would be meaningless. Same for the future. The meaning of the past (or any time) is not in the memory; it comes from the very conception we have of time. All this means that the content of being is mostly in the future, not in the present.

Heidegger goes to lengths to tie time back to all the existentials (and for this reason, his philosophy in "Being and Time" is sort of circular, which is by design. Our vague intuitions about Being make more sense the more you circle back and go through it all again.) But Being and Time was never really finished. So this is where we end.


Summary

Heidegger says sometime after the Greeks, the enterprise of philosophy veered off the path. All the work on metaphysics--the mind/body problem, perception and reality and what is really here--was sort of in vain. The problem is that no one ever figured out what is is. When you ask, What is?, you don't really know what is means. What does it mean to be?

Heidegger tries to tackle this question in Being and Time.

Because we probably can't get at what the being of a tree is, or what the being of a hammer is, or the being or anything besides ourselves, Heidegger focuses his inquiry on our Being, something he calls Dasein.

Now, because we do veer philosophically towards metaphysics--asking, What is?--we must have at least an intuitive understanding of being, of what is is. But before Heidegger gets at what it means to be, he accounts for all the ways we have of Being. To root out what is essential, Heidegger isolates the ways of Being that are the most basic. There are many basic ways of Being that each have their own significance. To criminally oversimply, our most basic ways of Being are being-in-the-world and ready-at-hand.

Our being-in-the-world is just our here-ness amid all this context. Our most basic way of relating to the world is to use it. What we use, we use before we posit and speculate on their thingness. And what we do stems from the fact that we have possibilities in which having already done things is possible. We have a disposition toward our surroundings and life and future. Essentially, we care. So, Being is Care. And the meaning of Care is Time, or temporality. The possibility of our own deaths shows us the way to this meaning.

This isn't revelatory, and having understood Being and Time (if that is fully possible) won't bring you enlightenment. Probably the wonder of the book is how Heidegger conceives the structure of Being and time as we live them, and how he dives beneath all the philosophy that had been done before him.

Notes

• Like Kant, Heidegger believed our way of questioning defines our understanding.

• And, interestingly, Heidegger says that reality is based on Care; reality is a mode of caring, a way of relating to the world. This means that reality is not the same thing as real things. Furthermore, truth is dependent upon our Being (Dasein); truth is not the correspondence of a proposition with reality, because those come after Being. For Heidegger, truth is when something shows itself to Dasein; truth refers to Dasein, not to things and propositions. (Heidegger's concept of truth is very Greek. His affinity for the ancient Greek philosophy is part of what makes him so difficult to read; he uses Greek words, investigates their possible meanings, and does some free-associating with the language. His affinity for the Greeks is also key to his association with the Nazis. Heidegger was a hardcore nationalist, and believed the Germans were the inheritors of Greek greatness, to put it one way.)

• Heidegger's privileging of possibilities over actualities seems to be the key to the brand of Existentialist philosophy that grew after Heidegger through Camus and Sartre, among others. For Heidegger and his successors, authenticity relates to Freedom, and Freedom to possibility. We almost naturally try to limit our choices because Freedom feels like a burden. Embracing Freedom and all the responsibility and unknowns that come with is to live authentically. To this end, feeling guilt is authentic. When we focus on actualities and facts and engage in small talk or pursue idle curiosity, we are being inauthentic. When we consider the possibilities of your lives and of not-being, we are authentic. So, if you always do what you are told and only care about what you already have, you would be inauthentic; you are more fully engaged with Being if you can consider possibilities. (Heidegger seems to bundle some value judgements in his use of authenticity, but these are not huge moral condemnations, I gather.)  Differentiating between authentic and inauthentic Being is a big part of Being and Time. I don't find it very attractive or even helpful to investigating Being, so I shortchange it here even more than I do the rest of Being and Time.

• Care is associated with another important existential called state of mind. Facts and reality influence one's state of mind. Although state of mind is tied to the actual, it is a part of both authentic and inauthentic existence because understanding the actual allows us to consider possibilities. State of mind is how and why the world matters to Dasein, it's why we care.

• History is about Dasein's worlds. Not the fact-hood of past events and people.

"You and Me"

Notes:
I tell you, baby, you're just enough for me.

The Muppet Show with Alice Cooper

Part 1:

 

Part 2:

 

Part 3:

"Comrade" by Volcano Choir

 

about "An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Martin Heidegger

Why is there something rather than nothing? So begins this intro class by Heidegger. But the real question concerning our professor isn't Why?, but What? What is "being"? Not just the physical being we try to account for through our senses, but the being that underscores everything; not, for example, the red apple, but an apple's being colored.

The thought of philosophically problematizing being might sound hackneyed. Heidegger knows this. Over time, he says we've grown alienated from this most basic of philosophical problems, and here he endeavors to reintroduce the matter seriously. His primary method for doing so is to reanimate the concepts and thoughts of the ancient Greeks; these are concepts that much influenced his own work.

Heidegger is notoriously difficult to study. This introductory lecture is no exception. Being appears vaporous and is indefinite in meaning, he admits, but, nevertheless, we know being is distinct from non-being, and so can conclude that we do intuit being in some sense everyday. Heidegger spent a considerable chunk of time and professional energy trying to catch that intuition.

More Heidegger readings to come.

something about the movie "Gravity"

The film "Gravity" offers a movie-going experience. Yes, the visuals stun and inspire. But it's more than beauty that makes us submit. The story is simple but the action engrossing; and the protagonist is uncomplicated--a supple mirror in which we replace the image with ourselves. So we fret and ease along with her as the film creates the illusion of time alternately speeding up and then crawling; it does so with the sounds of breathing, of heartbeats, of blinking lights, watches, and faceless monitors that beep out the pace, switching from measured rhythms to urgent, pleading buzzes. And when we finally reach the moment when we can pause and consider all that just happened, we're left with a sense of wonder--not just of the vastness of the universe, but the resilience of the human spirit. Now, this human spirit stuff is a sort of hackneyed theme and an easy payoff for the writers but it works okay here.


Notes:

• Highly recommend seeing this in 3D.
• In an academic setting, one could argue that this movie conveys Heideggerian themes. 
• This does not say anything to spoil.

I wear the required uniform.

"Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place."

Psychology for clicks

This Vanity Fair article, "The Lonely Guy," makes the case that President Obama's strong inward-directedness underpins his political failures. The diagnosis:

Self-containment is not simply Obama’s political default mode. Self-possession is the core of his being, and a central part of the secret of his success. It is Obama’s unwavering discipline to keep his cool when others are losing theirs, and it seems likely that no black man who behaved otherwise could ever have won the presidency.

But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it.

Obama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him?

The author would have us believe that Obama's self is the issue here. The matter is not poor leadership, carelessness, incompetence, bad delegation practices, or the simple fact that every presidency has some major failures. No, in Obama's case we find a complication of self.

The article then relates a few quotes from Obama's peers who say the man is aloof. Gradually the author shifts his thesis away from Obama's selfhood and toward his character, essentially saying the President is not a team player. "He has quietly purged from his inner circle those most likely to stand up to him." The fix? "Obama has always insisted that he is playing a long game. The problem is that when everyone else in Washington is still playing a short game, the president sometimes has to play on their board." This unsupported claim applies to the reader, too. The article's author renders a judgment that time can't bear out and the reader is supposed to click through.

something about "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's "The Elementary Particles" diagnosis society with irreversible decline brought on by failing social values and an addiction to the promises of technology and positivism. The social-sexual revolutions of the 1960s implanted an unwavering allegiance to individuality, and this in turn cost us community and the possibility of intimacy among friends and lovers. This trend coupled with cold, hard science pushed us all apart, leaving a developed world of lonely, desperate, frustrated people. Isolation, depression prevail.

This tale of shifting value systems is played out in the lives of half-brothers Michel and Bruno. Their mother was a sexually liberated woman who had no time or interest for children. Being an easy target for bullies, Bruno led a difficult childhood; Michel fared better, being brilliant but clearly withdrawn and romantically oblivious. Bruno grows into a sexually frustrated and obsessed adult, Michel into a molecular biologist. Late in life they each find a sad but redeeming relationship with women but even this last hurrah only underscores our doom--both women die, leaving the half-brothers half whole and forced to recollect the pieces of their already broken lives. Bruno finds not-unhappiness medicated in a sanitarium while Michel goes on to ensure the death of humanity by pioneering asexual reproduction.

Not a bad book. But I wouldn't call it good.

about mr. man

the Prayer to Our Lady of Perpetual Help

Mother of Perpetual Help, to Thee we come imploring help.
Behold us here from far and near, to ask of Thee our help to be.
Perpetual Help we beg Thee, our souls from sin and sorrow free;
Direct our wand'ring feet a-right, and be Thy self our own true light.
And when this life is o'er for me, this last request I ask of Thee;
Obtain for me in Heaven this grace, to see my God there face to face.

something about the film "Blade Runner"

1982's "Blade Runner" is a noir-ish, dystopian, science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer. In 2019 powerful corporations have manufactured genetically engineered organic robots called replicants to do dangerous and menial work on off-world colonies. Replicants are almost indistinguishable from humans, but they are engineered to live short lives--a few years, max.

When some replicants rebel on one of the colonies, they are banned from Earth; any of them discovered back on Earth are hunted down and "retired" by special operatives known as Blade Runners. The film tells the story of a group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles, and the veteran Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), hired to hunt them down.

The Tyrell Corporation is a major producer of replicants. Their slogan, "More Human Than Human," encapsulates the philosophical, physiological, and moral dilemma posed by the film: What does it mean to be human?

The slogan "More Human Than Human" doesn't merely pitch the advanced abilities of the intelligent, physically gifted replicants. It seems to differentiate and dehumanize replicants. It focuses on their otherness, and encapsulates it in the word more. But is there a difference? Can one human be more human than another?

Roy, played by Rutger Hauer, represents the newest, most advanced model of replicant. As the film's action rises, Roy breaks into the the penthouse occupied by the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation and demands more life from his maker. His manner is sinister, but his needs are all too human. At the end of the film, as his life runs out, Roy, resigned to his inevitable death, delivers a monologue regretting how his memories are about to be lost forever.

The film leads us to conclude that our protagonist, Deckard, is nothing more than a murderer. Does he share this view of himself? In the version of the film with voice-overs, he only refers to himself as a killer.
  

Notes: 

• The screenplay is loosely based on a Philip K. Dick novel.
• Drawing distinctions between peoples helps justify killing.

 

about "Believing Is Seeing" by Errol Morris

In Believing Is Seeing, Errol Morris investigates our relationship with photos--how we view them and what they mean to us. He uses several well-known photographs to flesh out some solid insights. One of the first insights is that we tend to look for motivations in a picture. What was the photographer trying to say? What is the guilt or innocence of the person in the picture? But Morris dismisses such attempts to infer anything beyond what the picture shows. Photos, he says, merely record data. But because we privilege vision, we imagine that photos provide a door to the truth. And in our imagining, we make false inferences and draw hasty, faulty conclusions.

Morris also questions and ultimately dismisses the idea that posed photos cannot serve as documentation and are inauthentic; the fact that something is always excluded from view (intentionally or not) while other things are included means that all pictures are posed to some degree. (This vein of discussion mirrors parts of modern rhetorical theory.)

Most of Believing Is Seeing is a super interesting read. My only complaint is that Morris strayed too far into the weeds in the last section when he forensically examines a set of documentary photos and their related documentation from public works projects of the Depression. 


Note:
The book's full title is Believing Is Seeing: Observations On the Mysteries of Photography.

about no authority

Maybe you heard that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting sparked a national conversation on gun ownership. Or maybe you heard that George Zimmerman's jury trial for killing Trayvon Martin prompted a national conversation on race. Or, with young Americans Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden being accused of espionage, perhaps you heard that we're conversating nationally about privacy and surveillance, or about freedom and safety. Amid any controversy now, pundits and the public readily declare or call for a national conversation about the issue.

What's more, these "national conversations" are often fueled by "competing narratives" of rhetors who, in the public debate, project certain "optics". We hear this kind of language in political news coverage more and more--language that implies open questions with no shared sense of answers, truths, or appeals to objectivity. This talk signals a shift or further slide in our worldview toward a wider, freer recognition of relativism and subjectivity as opposed to a shared sense of culture and identity. The news has never been totally neutral as it is vulnerable to a number of institutional biases (visual bias, narrative bias, fairness bias, etc.), but now it seems to be inching even further away from its attempt to describe one reality.

The declaration that we're having a national conversation waylays news coverage of polarizing issues. Having a national conversation about an issue defuses and mutes the controversy by invoking the illusion of thoughtful, productive dialog held around America's dinner tables and water coolers. The declaration that we're engaged in conversation substitutes for real dialog or conflict resolution. We talk about problems; we do not solve them. We air grievances and arguments, but all for naught because the discussion and coverage of it simply exhaust themselves, and we're left with nothing but the next thing to talk about.

Using the word narratives invokes the idea of a story, a version of events. This is obviously wholly different from the truth. The reader can decide to accept it or reject it. There are dominant narratives and prevailing narratives, but no truth.

Another new term in political news coverage is the word optics. Optics refers to the perspective of the viewer, how things look, and the first surface-level impression a given issue or person(s) makes on the news consumer. A check for patterns is basic first-level analysis. This is something people with a even a passing interest in a given object do anyway, without the help of experts. At best, what is seen is equal parts wall and window, a distraction and glimpse inside. Here, the truth is traded for appearances. The truth or reality is a nonconcern. The impression is stated, and its ephemerality and inconclusiveness is informally recognized and sanctioned.

If this argument is valid, and if it signals anything, it would signal the further disintegration of shared sense of culture and identity.

Notes:
Or maybe this has always been the case.

Update:
Some historians say that, in the Progressive Era, journalism could unite public opinion which would push Congress to pass legislation fixing some problem. This is precisely what a national conversation prevents.

about calling bullshit

The Wall Street Journal calls bullshit on Malcolm Gladwell. He's a salesman in that fraudulent industry that markets threadbare insights.

Gladwell isn't even a provocateur. He's a selective aggregator of statistics that yield him spurious conclusions.

I don't believe it

about "I Wear The Black Hat" by Chuck Klosterman

I Wear the Black Hat bounces around the topic of villainy with a collection of deftly written essays by American writer and essayist Chuck Klosterman. The reading flies by thanks to Klosterman's fresh prose. He's at his best when musing over the finer points of individuals and pop culture references; one of the best passages in I Wear the Black Hat finds Klosterman articulating the nuances of his (and many others') intolerance for the classic rock band The Eagles.

But, unfortunately, Klosterman too easily gives in to the temptation to sound profound, and the result is a handful of hasty generalizations; a prime example from this book is when he attempts to extrapolate a larger cultural lesson from the decline of 1980's flash-in-the-pan comedian Andrew Dice Clay.* This kind of fallacy is pervasive in the pop culture-centric variety of writing commonly found in sources like The New Yorker, Gawker, and Deadspin among others. Nevertheless, I Wear the Black Hat is an overall agreeable read by an astute observer and talented writer.


Notes:
* There have been so, so many Andrew Dice Clays--performers and artists who seem to suddenly appear but then disappear--that putting any single one of them under a microscope should attract a good measure of skepticism. In the case of the "Diceman," maybe interest in him waned simply because he only had one joke.

that another year is gone

I didn't realize what day it was until getting to work and seeing the date on the morning's first email. That was it. The rest of the day passed unnoticed.

but not now

something about Michel Foucault, "The Government of Self and Others"

These lectures, delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982 and 1983, meditate on the concept of truth-telling known as parresia. The bulk of these lectures have Foucault tracing the use, exercise, and implications of parresia through ancient Greek texts.

Foucault starts, however, in the Enlightenment.

What is Enlightenment? Kant asked, and Foucault restates the question: What is this present?* Foucault finds here not only the beginning of contemporary philosophy but the seed of his own brand of inquiry: a discursive practice of philosophy that collides with its own present reality. The speaker--first, Kant, now, Foucault--is no longer speaking as a member of a philosophical tradition or community, but as a part of the present. And, ever since, philosophy has continued questioning its own present reality.

In his reflections on the Enlightenment, Kant speculated that the human race was making progress. He figured that popular support abroad for the ideals propelling the French Revolution symbolized this progress. Man was leaving an era in which he was unwilling to use his reason. Now, he would reason; and, once free to exercise his reason, he could be obedient. More freedom of thought, more obedience. And this obedience requires a kind of self-governance that Foucault interrogates in much of his work.

After a brief visit with the Enlightenment, Foucault starts to dwell in the ancient texts, starting with the myth of Ion and rounding the final corner with Plato's Phaedrus. In these stories he identifies the roles and implications of courage, politics, rhetoric, and philsosophy in the practice and concept of truth-telling known as parresia.

To my mind, this was so far the least compelling of these newly published Foucault lectures. But my mind is somewhere else now, maybe.

Notes:
* Prior to the Enlightenment, people spoke of the present in terms of periods of prosperity or decadence.

Constitution of the United States

what Big Daddy said

 
"Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die."

   -Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Suicidal Tendencies, "Institutionalized"

about the book "Suite française" by Irène Némirovsky

Suite française pushes us gently, more or less, into Occupied France, 1940. We shuffle around with members of the upper, middle, and lower classes trying to escape and then settle under the Germans.

This book--alternatively titled Dolce and Captivité--is an incomplete draft of two parts of a war-time epic that the author, Irène Némirovsky, wanted to write. She would never finish.

Born in 1903 in the Russian Empire, Némirovsky fled the Russian Revolution in 1917 and eventually settled in Paris, France. She soon began writing, published a couple books, and achieved wide recognition as an author. But her Jewish ancestry remained an issue--enough so that French citizenship was denied the Némirovskys in 1938. Némirovsky, born Russian-Jewish,  converted to Catholicism in 1939; with the pressure on, she wrote for Candide and Gringoire, two magazines with antisemitic tendencies.

Nevertheless, by 1940, Némirovsky's books could no longer be published under the spreading occupation. She fled with her husband and two daughters to Burgundy; but in July 1942, Némirovsky, then 39, was arrested by French police under German authority. She ended up in Auschwitz and died a month later of typhus. Later that year, her husband, Michel Epstein, was gassed at Auschwitz.

So, given this backstory, the flaws in the draft Suite française are unimportant. I enjoyed most the domestic drama between a formidable woman named Madame Angellier, a young maiden, Lucile, and Bruno, a German soldier bunking with the women. This is the most developed thread of multiple story lines that Némirovsky never got to tie together. Lucile and the soldier kindle a romance that disgusts Madame Angellier, a proud woman already embittered by loss of family and national pride. In the final pages, the soldier bids the women adieu as he and the other occupying German soldiers are called away to the horrible war on the Eastern Front. Lucile makes her last pathetic request of the soldier:

"... I'm asking you, if you have any feelings for me, to be as careful as possible with your life."
"Because it is precious to you?" he asked nervously.
"Yes, Because it is precious to me."

And Suite française's narration considers,

How many Germans in the village--in cafés, in the comfortable houses they had occupied--were now writing to their wives, their fiancée's, leaving behind their worldly possessions, as if they were about to die?

In two appendices full of the author's notes and letters from various others in her life at the time, Némirovsky reveals herself to be a very complicated person, veering between philosophical musings, harsh political judgements, vain self-assessments, and composed fear. Némirovsky perhaps intended to indict the French for their lack of answers to the occupation, but what I read is far less localized, and quietly emotes on several universal themes. This is a worthy read.

about a passing

Leaving for the day, I looked out the revolving door and noticed the airy drizzle. These were the raindrops swelling up in the heat of your breath, suffocating me on the walk out from the suspended life of a day at the office.

another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.

Pictures of him as a boy

For leaking classified US government information to the website Wikileaks, on July 30, 2013, Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was convicted of 17 charges, including five counts of espionage and theft. On the heels of this verdict, The New York Times published an article titled "Loner Sought a Refuge, and Ended Up in War". Here, Manning is described as a lifelong outcast. The article further reveals that it was not his crimes that he was being tried for, but his identity:

As prosecutors accused Private Manning of being a self-promoting “anarchist” who was nothing like the tortured man of principle portrayed by his lawyers, supporters around the world celebrated him as a martyr for free speech. But the heated language on both sides tended to overshadow the human story at the center of the case.

The article does the sense-making for us. In its narrative, Manning's online connections--first with Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, then with computer hacker Adrian Lamo--that led to this conviction follow a pattern, and add the apparently unfortunate conclusion to his coherent life's story. However, contrary to what the article says, it is precisely the human story that has been at the center of the case and the center of media coverage from day one: international outlaw, Julian Assange; guilty martyr, Bradley Manning; narcissistic fugitive, Edward Snowden--these are the characters, and they are the story.

a month late about the NRA response to the Newtown massacre

A week after 20 children and six adult staff members were murdered during a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, US, the NRA's Executive VP and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, read a public statement representing the NRA's response. The NRA called for installing armed security at schools, reasoning that banks, courthouses, office buildings, etc., all have armed security. The NRA's statement went on to at least partially attribute the appearance of escalating public violence to video games and movies.

In the wake LaPierre's reading, one line from the statement came to represent the whole of it:

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?

Critics and detractors panned the statement, calling it paranoid and delusional. Politically, it had its strengths and weaknesses. But the takeway statement--that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun--that part is special.

This line is special because it harmonizes the interests of the NRA's individual members with those of gun manufacturers and sellers. See, gun manufacturers and sellers accept bad guys' money as surely as they accept good guys'. In their ideal scenario, everyone is armed. Good guys have a gun; bad guys have a gun. And the industry has the cash.

Meanwhile, the NRA's individual members all imagine they are good guys--good guys armed for the benefit of all the would-be victims out there.

about Søren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or"

This review is incomplete. In fact, this isn't properly a review of Either/Or at all. I struggled to stay interested, and by the latter third of this collection of essays, I was barely even skimming the text.

My edition is abridged, and the editor's preface reasons that passages in the original complete text could (read: should) have been edited out in the first place. After having pushed through a majority of these pages, I can understand the temptation to trim a text in hopes of avoiding the kind of wheel-spinning that can mar an otherwise valuable work.

Now, Either/Or.

Kierkegaard wrote and published Either/Or using pseudonyms. He even fronted the text with an editor's preface that gives a fictional account of the book's contents--various writings roughly divided into an aesthetically-oriented first half, followed by an ethically, duty-oriented second.

The aesthetic portion is a collection of essays largely about artistic appreciation, love, and boredom. It's also largely consumed with melancholy. Kierkegaard's fictional authors discuss real works of art, and focus on the abstract, lending otherworldly qualities to the finer arts. Early on, there is some discussion that reminds me of Plato's forms--things themselves and ideas of things.

The "Shadowgraphs" essay has some of the more interesting content in this half. Here is a striking, although very historically-situated passage:

The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is constantly in search of its object; the searching is the unrest of sorrow and its life. But this searching is a constant fluctuation, and if the outer were at every moment a perfect reflection of the inner, to represent reflective sorrow would require an entire series of pictures and no one picture would require genuine artistic value, since it would not be beautiful but true. We would have to look at the pictures as we do at the second hand of the watch; the works themselves are invisible, but the inner movement constantly expresses itself in the constant change of the outer. But this change cannot be represented in art, yet it is the whole point.

And, soon after, Kierkegaard's fictional author compares the pain of broken engagements to that of a broken marriage; this comparison is especially meaningful coming from Kierkegaard because, prior to Either/Or's publishing, he broke off an engagement and was much scandalized for it publicly, and much tormented by it privately. He reasoned in his journals that he broke the engagement because he did not have faith, supposedly. In Either/Or, he writes:

What must evoke reflective sorrow even more ... is the fact that it is only an engagement that has been broken off. An engagement is a possibility, not something actual, yet just because it is only a possibility, it might seem that the effect of its being broken off would be less, that it is much easier to withstand this blow. And sometimes that may well be true. On the other hand, the fact that it is only a possibility that is destroyed tempts reflection much more to the fore. When something actual is brought to an end, generally the break is far more radical, every nerve is cut asunder and in itself the fracture, regarded as such, remains complete. When a possibility is broken off, the instantaneous pain may not be as great, but then it leaves one or another small ligament whole an unharmed, which becomes a constant source of continued suffering. The destroyed possibility appears transfigured in a higher possibility, while the temptation to conjure up such a new possibility is less when it is something actual that is broken off, because actuality is higher than possibility.

Then the book continues with exercises in art appreciation. The focus on seen and unseen aspects of art continue, as the speaker strives to see real works as higher representations. Obviously, Kierkegaard does not regard the aesthetic as the equivalent of hedonism.

The second half (maybe less than half) of the book focuses on ethical considerations and a sense of duty. I didn't necessarily see these halves as being in direct tension. But my attention started to wane. So much so that I won't continue here. I'll have to revisit this later.

Did you know: O.J. Simpson played for the 49ers, 1978-79

After he was injured in 1977, the Bills traded O.J. Simpson to the San Francisco 49ers for a second-round draft pick. He retired in 1979.

about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

We join a father and son journeying down a desolate but dangerous road cut through postapocalyptic America. They, suffering, were just trying to get to the end. I felt the same, reading this story in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

We're the good guys, the father says. But in time the boy begins to doubt, then grows wholly disbelieving. Through his seared-in allegiance to his son's preservation, the man abandons his capacity to trust, and so loses his humanity.

After figuring this out, the boy sees that, though he is his father's burden, he is the one shouldering the world. His humanity still budding, the boy worries for each damned soul they pass.

Having reached the coast and been turned back around, The Road finally concludes with father-protector dying, and son taking the hand of a stranger; whether this show of desperate hope and resigned trust will be rewarded is unknown.

Cormac McCarthy links hope and trust; and those, with youth. So what does this futuristic tale, published in 2006, say about our fate?

Unlike Cormac McCarthy's one-dimensional dustbin of days, our terrain grows more and more complicated, but also more open, with more people connected and more isolated and stratified at the same time. And here, again, we see that caution and the drive for self-preservation is as indispensable as the capacity for hope and trust. But, moreover, in Cormac McCarthy's world, both persist with us until our dying day. Cynical, pointless doom.

I appreciated that McCarthy's sparse prose reflected the desolate world he created, but I never got into this, and did not enjoy it in any sense.