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.