about "The Plague" by Albert Camus

Rats wobble out into daylight and begin dying in ones and twos. Then by the dozens. Then by the thousands. This is how The Plague begins.

 

The authorities are slow to accept the looming tragedy in 1940s Oran, a port city in French Algeria. But Dr. Bernard Rieux, with a growing sense of urgency, finally goads the medical community into action. Rieux is the main character, and most of the novel's action unfolds in the hearts of the men in Rieux's orbit. They experience fear, defiance, isolation, desperation, and resignation. And in their trials they achieve moments of shame, faith, solidarity, courage, and compassion.

Philosophy—existentialism, of course, by Albert Camus—seeps through the pages. The human condition? Weakness and suffering and the exercise of moral freedom and responsibility in the face of an absurd and indifferent universe. Camus writes a dark story in which redeeming human moments sometimes catch the light.

The Stranger is probably my all-time favorite book, but no other Camus book, including this one, has connected with me the same way. The prose here is lovely, but the characters remain distant, and I never invested in them.

 

It could be my timing: when I read it, I had just spent weeks soaking in the raw inner lives of Richard Yates's characters; Camus's men seem aloof by comparison.

Note: The Plague was published in 1947.

 

something or other

There are worlds on Earth he can never know—like a world in which his wife has a strong Christian faith and offers him her loving arms.

 

something about "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

Meditations is a collection of personal reflections written by Marcus Aurelius (121-180), the Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD. The writings reflect the life of a Stoic. The Stoic philosophy is not like asceticism, which is a lifestyle of abstinence and frugality. Stoicism, as represented in Marcus Aurelius' writings, is closer to Zen; the Emperor-author emphasizes focus, moderation, self-control, and harmony.

I appreciate how Marcus Aurelius begins the day by focusing on the values he wants to live and exhibit through his behavior. I also love this lesson and promise: "From Alexander the Platonic, not frequently nor without necessity to say to any one, or to write in a letter, that I have no leisure; nor continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by our relation to those with whom we live, by alleging urgent occupations."

Note: The version I read was translated by George Long and was published in a Harvard Classics edition that also includes Plato's The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito, as well as Epictetus' The Golden Sayings.

something about "On Bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt

Frankfurt begins this meditation on bullshit by examining the definition offered in Max Black's 1985 essay, "The Prevalence of Humbug": bullshit is the "deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes." Frankfurt gets his footing here, but says this definition fails to adequately capture "the essential character of bullshit." Frankfurt next mines a few bullshit-related anecdotes and quotes to uncover his theoretical understanding of bullshit. The somewhat oversimplified synopsis of that understanding is that what is essential about bullshit is that (1) the bullshitter cares not for what is true or false, like the liar and the honest man (in fact, the bullshitter could be saying things that are more or less true and still be bullshitting) and (2) the bullshitter says whatever suits him at the moment in an attempt to deceive his audience about what he is up to and who he is.

The prose in "On Bullshit" is crisp and graciously plain; Frankfurt's essay, an exploratory philosophical analysis, manages to avoid philosophy jargon and name dropping.

Note: This is good:

One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes  that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can  have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.

something about "Dangling Man" by Saul Bellow

 
Our Dangling Man keeps a journal in which he agonizes over the gaps between his past and present selves. His encounters with people sound largely antagonistic.

The voice of the journal belongs to Joseph, a young man living in Chicago. At this moment in his life, Joseph is unemployed, and 1942 America is at war. Joseph's voice captures truths that are universal (or, at least national), temporal, and personal. Frustration over his compulsion to drill and drill himself for value taint Joseph's reflections. Although determined to unleash these thoughts, Joseph is an unwilling participant in a culture that increasingly casts every self in the lead role.

At the time of his writings, Joseph, Canadian by birth, has been waiting for word on his acceptance into the American army during World War II. He surrenders his personal freedom to end this suffering. He closes his journal with the words,

Hurray for regular hours!
And for the supervision of the spirit!
Long live regimentation!

Notes:
Dangling Man, written in 1944, is Saul Bellow's first published work. I thought Dangling Man had interesting moments, but I did not enjoy reading it.

about "The Concept of Anxiety" and "The Sickness Unto Death" by Søren Kierkegaard

 
Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death were published in the 1840s. The discussion of freedom and anxiety in these works laid the foundation for existentialism. Kierkegaard was the first modern philosopher and the first person to find himself in a modern age. However, his faith and spirituality make him timeless.

Philosophy departments consider The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death to be a pair.

The Concept of Anxiety explores sin, guilt, and anxiety, which is undirected fear, a general sense of dread. Kierkegaard rebuffs the idea that anxiety is caused by original sin. Rather, innocence generates the conditions for anxiety. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; recall that God forbade Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge. God's directive makes Adam aware that he has a choice. This freedom to choose causes anxiety. Furthermore, Adam could not have known he was sinning because, being the first to sin, how would he know what sin was? Sin was real only after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge. Rejoice in your freedom.

The Sickness Unto Death explores spiritual death, which is despair. Here, Kierkegaard deals with self, or the self-concept of selfhood: the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard delves into the binary concepts of the finite and the infinite and the possible and the necessary. Tension between these polarities results from not being right with God. And, thus, despair. Kierkegaard elaborates further that there are three kinds of despair. All this is not as interesting as The Concept of Anxiety, so I will not elaborate. However, my favorite passage in The Sickness Unto Death comes when Kierkegaard is describing the person who lives life in a religious mode, but who, in the process of becoming spiritual, has lost his self:

Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed.

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

about Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"

Properly titled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, this fundamental economic opus is the work of brilliant Scottish polymath, Adam Smith. Published in 1776 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, The Wealth of Nations describes the classical liberal, capitalist economy as a largely self-maintaining economic model built on free enterprise and individual pursuits of self-interest.

Smith's work is canonical, but a surprise nevertheless. This encyclopedic monster often reads like an in-depth high-school economics text book. But the dry writing (or dry translation of the writing) masks lots of fascinating bites, like Smith's views on colonialism and slavery, for example. He kicks off by crediting the development of the division of labor as the greatest single factor in nations' increasing productivity.

That one man could organize his thoughts and lay them out like this is a marvel. Nothing short of incredible.

The Wealth of Nations is the cornerstone of modern conservative free-market philosophy. I read a two-volume set produced by a private foundation called Liberty Fund, which, according to their website, seeks "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation (sic) develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on enduring issues pertaining to liberty."

something about "The Birth of the Clinic" by Michel Foucault

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault mines late 18th and early 19th century changes in medical practice (this, significantly, is around the time of the American and French Revolutions, following on the heels of the Enlightenment). These changes shaped modern medicine.

The discourse on human rights inspired by these revolutions led to an overall concern with society and health; and the move toward egalitarianism pushed physicians (and teaching physicians) out of the the aristocracy and reassigned them to general society.

The new imaginings of hard science dictated that we let truths reveal themselves to us. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault feels out what he calls the medical gaze--a way of seeing in which the physician allows the disease to reveal its own truth. The human body gives off signs, and the physician uses his knowledge and observations of the body to translate the reality of the disease.

The physician talks to the patient, observes him, examines him, orders tests and whatnot. Mysticism is abandoned for a discussion of the body; the physician relies less on bookish medical wisdom and instead reads the body. The physician's eye sees in space symptoms and physical signs.

The physician’s observations affect the gaze; the gaze affects the physician. Doctors systematically describe diseases using medical jargon. The physician's power is now his experience rather than his status. The gaze has scientific credibility. And we've successfully achieved truth in spite of the doctor's status, not because of it. (So we think.)

Karl Marx

about "Candide" by Voltaire

Candide is a novella by Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778). The witty, outspoken Voltaire was often at odds with the laws, customs, and institutions of his day. Despite--or perhaps because of--his controversies, Voltaire achieved great fame in his lifetime.

First published in 1759, Candide unfolds the adventures of a naive but bright young man who optimistically emerges from an idyllic upbringing only to meet painfully with a world burdened with wrongs, hardships, and evils that invite his disillusionment.
 
Initially taught that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," the young Candide concludes after contending with the problem of evil that, in life, one should "cultivate our garden." What this philosophical riddle means is much debated.

Voltaire is posing our dilemma: How do we respond faced with the problem of evil? Now, as adults, far, far away from any Garden of Eden, how do we approach the world? This absurd allegory encourages us to be clear-eyed, tireless reformers working toward the good. 

about "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In a Russian a literary journal in 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment, a  novel that follows a young man named Rodion Raskolnikov immediately before and after he murders an unscrupulous pawnbroker and her feeble sister. The motive, which does not seem fully and explicitly formed even for our protagonist, develops through Dostoyevsky's narrative. It seems altogether an act of desperate poverty, self-empowerment, and destiny.

In those forlorn, guilt-infected postmurder days spent adrift among a diverse cast of emotional string-pulling supporting characters, Raskolnikov remains under suspicion but not arrest. The action turns when a coy police inspector reminds Raskolnikov of an essay the would-be murderer wrote as a college student; the essay suggests a slight perversion of the Great Man theory--that great men use their power, be it charisma, intelligence, political and military wits, what have you, to transcend conventions and change the world. So, we come to understand, Raskolnikov's act of murder is a test of his own greatness (though he simultaneously thinks himself a slug). But, ultimately, crushed with guilt, self-doubt, and facing inevitable arrest, Raskolnikov confesses and begins his sentence in Siberia.

Among other things, Crime and Punishment dives into Dostoyevsky's personal philosophy that suffering and degradation bring salvation. The novel turns on our ideas of law, crime, morality, reason, and society and the individual. It asks, What is the difference between the man who transgresses boundaries to achieve his ambitions and the man who defies conventions to achieve greatness?



Notes:

• One of the most noted events in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's biography is his 1849 arrest for his association with some liberal utopians; he was condemned to death, but then spared moments before his execution and re-sentenced to four years' hard labour in Siberia. He later traveled through Europe, but developed epilepsy and a nasty gambling addiction. Hard times followed, but also some great literature.

• Besides exploring universal themes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels are also very Russian, set in 19th-century Russia during the nation's never-ending, clumsy push to modernize.

about "The Courage of Truth" by Michel Foucault

This is another installment in the newly published series of lectures (and lecture notes) given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. This one, however, was the last one he gave there before dying. These lectures were recorded during February and March, 1984. He died June 25, 1984.

This book is subtitled "The Government of Self and Others II" because it picks up where his previous string of lectures, "The Government of Self and Others" (published in this same series by Picador), left off. So we begin again with the concept of parrhesia: free-spokeness, or, defined more emphatically, truth-telling. A few high-profile truth-tellers, just to give you an idea, might include Americans Mark Twain or Will Rogers (more recently, some people might include Jon Stewart). But rather than seeing parrhesia in merely the presence of a few pop culture figures, Foucault drills the concept of parrhesia to mine for its broader, deeper significance and implications.

In Foucault's late lectures, he is imparting an ontology of true discourses. First, "The Government of Self and Others" established parrhesia as originally a political notion. But here, through Foucault's reading of Plato (on Socrates) and his study of Cynicism, it expands into philosophy.

Foucault established parrhesia as a necessary component in effective democracies; the best political system will be the one run by virtuous men. In "The Courage of Truth," parrhesia differentiates the man, the leader, from the masses. A leader's truth-telling not only shows his moral/ethical worth, it also is part of the speaker's self conception. So, as established in ancient philosophy, the best political system is run by virtuous men who can uncork the discourse of truth. In this analysis, Foucault is running the technologies of power (and government), knowledge, and subject formation through the gauntlet. These things are intertwined in ancient philosophy, and so they are in most of Foucault's texts.

This lecture's opening focuses on Plato's "Apology," the story of Socrates death, and "Leches," a work exploring courage. With these works, we first find that parrhesia and indeed all of ancient ethics revolve around the care of the self (i.e., self development, self government, self discipline, etc.). Furthermore, parrhesia is bound up in one's existence and formation of self. The latter portions of "The Courage of Truth" examine the Cynics--a people who denied themselves even basic comforts to strip away any artifice that might stand in the way of Truth. This drastic lifestyle eventually showed people that there was another life: an other life, or, the other life (varies by interpreted experience).

Christianity blended the Platonic concept of care of self--the work of purifying the soul ahead of its eventually authentic existence in another world--with the Cynics' quest to defy "temporal customs" in search of basic values.

So you take the two parts of "The Courage of Truth"--the way truth-telling separates the speaker from the masses and the philsophic introduction of the possibility of the other (better) life promised by the Cynics and their successors--and you find that, since the dawn of Western philosophy with the Ancients, the hallmark of the True is Otherness: that which makes a difference and opens the possibility of another reality. This, according to Michael Foucault, is what philosophy is, what it does. There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life.

This is a poignant book; the editor's notes go to lengths to drive this home; Foucault, knowing death would come soon, like Socrates, practiced philosophy and kept his eye on Truth until the end.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.