Two requests for suggestions

Last year’s instructors of Humanities 1 (Art and Music) developed a new format for the class that is loosely organized around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text that has inspired a lot of art and music and is also in large part about human creativity. There were, however, a couple things that didn’t fit as well into that framework, including Svetlana Alpers’ The Vexation of Art: Velasquez and Others. The goal was to provide some art criticism from a woman in a class where it is otherwise difficult to find women’s work to include — and so I ask you, dear readers, if anyone by chance knows of another work of art criticism by a woman that has more direct overlap with art inspired by Ovid. (I know this is a weirdly specific request and probably something of a long-shot.)

In addition, for my elective over Being and Time, I have tentatively decided to begin with a couple days each on phenomenology and hermeneutics, then work through The Concept of Time (i.e., the unpublished book review that is billed as “the first draft of Being and Time,” not the lecture series with a similar title). Given that we’ll be reading through Being and Time in painstaking detail, I thought using his shorter “first draft” would be a good way to get an overview of the project as a whole without biasing them toward any particular scholar’s interpretation of it. A colleague of mine has a good text of Husserl’s in mind, and another has recommended some passages from Gadamer — but I would prefer to use Dilthey if possible, given that that’s who Heidegger is directly discussing. Does anyone know of a good essay or chunk that we could spend a day or two on?

Please note: I am not planning to use any secondary sources for the Heidegger course, so I would prefer that you not make any recommendations of that kind. (And just to make sure: yes, I am aware of Simon Critchley’s online introduction to Being and Time.)

What is called grading? On the ontological structure of academia

The academy is in crisis. Adjunctification, outcome assessment, online learning, for-profit universities — all of these things have been decried as challenging the very foundations of the academic enterprise. Yet no one stops to ask what that foundation is. We have forgotten about the question of the being of academia. We must put ourselves in a position to ask it afresh, so that we can begin to sketch out the ontological structure of academia. (Here I limit myself to institutions of higher education — lower levels present different, though not unrelated, problems.)

Let us start from the assumption that the academic enterprise is a type of professional practice. Academics never achieved the clearly “professional” status of doctors and lawyers — and our ontological investigation may disclose the inner necessity of that failure — but that status remains an indispensable point of reference. Part of being a professional in the modern world is obviously being certified by the state to undertake some kind of activity in an authoritative way. Anyone can give medical or legal advice, but that does not make them a doctor or lawyer. Further, there are some aspects of being a doctor or lawyer that only “work” if the state certification is present. Not just anyone can write a prescription or rightly demand attorney-client privilege.

Broadly speaking, the aspects of professionality that require state certification to be effective are performative speech acts that the state has empowered the professional to undertake. This puts us into a position to ask: What are academics empowered to do?

Schmitt and Heidegger

[Warning: This post is preliminary, superficial, and almost certainly unoriginal. "Just throwin' it out there!"]

Lately I’ve been making my way through Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, primarily because it’s where he discusses the katechon (and because I want to have the relevant background when I turn to Cacciari’s Il potere che frena). One thing that strikes me is that it seems very Heideggerian in its approach and tone — the insistence on an originary meaning of nomos that our modern and superficial concepts have caused us to forget, the vast epochal shifts turning on conceptual changes (such as the meaning of a geographical “line”), etc.

One would presume that there would be certain similarities in their thought, given that both were able to function as major Nazi intellectuals, but it’s interesting to me that the connection only jumps out at me in this post-war work. In retrospect, though, one could certainly make a connection between the existential stakes of the properly political in Schmitt and Heidegger’s notion of authentic being-toward-death (and in fact, Paul Kahn does make exactly that connection in his rewriting of Political Theology). And Schmitt’s “sociology of concepts” could be a kind of “history of Being.”

Anyway.

The business press considered in light of the ontological difference

You know how I’ll frequently claim that, for all its obvious drawbacks, the business press is more reliable than the mainstream media? Here’s a good example — a Business Week cover article entitled, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

It is almost literally impossible to imagine, for example, a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover article with the same “one-sided” approach. And that’s because the mainstream media exists in order to pander to as many people’s prejudices as possible, while the business press is actually making an effort to deliver some kind of usable information.

The business press is, of course, ontologically awful. Their answer to the perennial question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is simple and direct: in order to provide income to financial asset-holders. Ontically, however, they can be useful.

Science envy

The hottest new trend in continental philosophy is scientism. Where all of us benighted continentalists worry over meta-commentary on previous readings of interpretations of old German texts, you see, scientists are really engaging directly with the real!

Well, let me tell you: I’ve actually been doing science this semester in the Shimer Natural Sciences 1 class I’ve been auditing. I’ve laboriously read through foundational texts of pre-modern and modern chemistry. I’ve taken part in modern adaptations of classical lab experiments, such as the experiment with the calcination of tin that allowed Lavoisier to definitively disprove the existence of phlogiston and cleared the way for the recognition of oxygen. I daresay that this experience, however rudimentary it undoubtedly is, represents a more concrete engagement with scientific practice than most of our current science fetishists have had since high school.

As a result of this engagement, I’ve come to some preliminary conclusions. First, the natural sciences are conceptual disciplines and mostly don’t want to admit it. Experimental results are not unmediated encounters with the real, but tests of concepts — often requiring extremely contrived set-ups that would never be even approximated in a thousand years of passive “empirical observation.” Any number of “wrong” systems can account for observed results (viz., the phlogiston theory, which was actually pretty robust, until someone thought of the question it couldn’t answer).

The scientific method is obviously extremely powerful, but its (often willful) blindness to the real nature of its practice and its totalitarian ambition to explain everything (i.e., reduce everything to “scientific” terms) also make it extremely dangerous. Hence one of the most important jobs of philosophers is to be critics of science, in the Kantian sense of the word. In other words, Husserl and Heidegger and Foucault were basically right.

Phlogiston and You!

In the Natural Sciences class I’m taking, we’ve spent the last couple weeks working through various attempts to understand the nature of heat. As it turns out, Bacon “got it right” early on by proposing that heat was in some sense motion, but it is surprising how tenacious the view of heat as some type of “fire particle” was. The theory of phlogiston (i.e., fire-matter united with other types of matter in chemical compounds) was so stubbornly adhered to that the person who (arguably) discovered what we would now call oxygen thought he had actually produced something called “dephlogisticated air,” and even Lavoisier, who properly discovered and named oxygen as such, maintained a variation on the phlogiston theory with his notion of heat particles called “caloric.”

We started the class the the pre-Socratics, and I was working my way through Being and Time during those weeks, so for me this whole class has been framed by the “question of the meaning of Being.” It seems to me that a lot of these problems could’ve been avoided had the scientists in question thought more attentively about that question. For instance, it seems to me that in all their texts, there’s a latent conceptual distinction between heat-as-substance and heat-as-effect — why should the latter be limited to cases where the former is present? And if it shouldn’t, what work is the notion of a heat-substance really doing? Can’t there “be” heat in some sense even if it’s not a substance?

Further, it seems to me that the advent of modern science in rebellion against Aristotelian scholasticism follows a familiar pattern where surface-level polemic masks a deeper solidarity: in this case, both share the metaphysics of substance. I wonder if a more authentic return to Aristotle and specifically to his theory of potentiality as one of “the ways in which being is said” may have provided a more fruitful conceptual framework.

Badiou the Left Heideggerian: Some thoughts

I have only begun to think this through, so maybe it will turn out to be entirely wrong — but I think that Badiou essentially belongs in the series of “left Heideggerians” that includes Agamben and Nancy. As far as I understand it, the big point that supposedly separates Badiou from Heidegger is that Badiou embraces the infinite while Heidegger is stuck with the pathos of finitude. Yet I think there are nonetheless very significant structural similarities and that this distinction isn’t doing as much work to distance Badiou from Heidegger as he thinks.

Obviously there’s the Event.

Negri on Agamben’s Opus Dei

Via @Potentia_Space, a review of Agamben’s recent work Opus Dei by Negri has been translated into English, characterizing this book as the “end” of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and the series as a whole as an attempt to complete Heidegger’s archeology of Being.

Lacan the Heideggerian

[Obligatory disclaimer of any implication of originality.]

As I’ve been reading the early Lacan, I’ve been puzzled by exactly what the many references to Heidegger are doing for him, what he’s getting out of Heidegger. Clearly Heidegger is important to him personally — he makes a huge deal out of the translation of Heidegger’s “Logos” essay that he did for his journal, he bulks out his introduction and response to Hyppolite’s presentation on Verneinung with Heideggerian references for the Écrits version (the original seminar version is much shorter), etc.

A cynical read would have him simply following an intellectual trend, but I think there’s more going on — in fact, I think Lacan’s appropriation of Heidegger is arguably much more faithful to the Heideggerian project than is the existentialist appropriation that was going on around the same time.

Presocratics

Does anyone know of an affordable edition of the Presocratics with the Greek text? Or a readily accessible online resource? We’re reading them in the Natural Science 1 course I’m taking this semester at Shimer, and I’d like to take a closer look (and perhaps ultimately dig into Heidegger’s work on them — is it worth working through his courses?).