 | Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder. We can only act in terms of our own time, among the people who surround us. We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill. |
✖ Via The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus, tr. by Anthony Bower, “Introduction” (L’Homme révolté, Gallimard, Paris, 1951, p. 14). An electronic version of this English translation can be found over at Radical eBook Archive (along with many others). |
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Aug 30 link notes
art
book
essay
author
philosophy
modernity
revolution
murder
innocence
Camus
 | Un jeune collègue, bon spécialiste de Kant, étudiant la philosophie kantienne dans ses rapports avec la biologie et la médecine du 18e siècle, m’avait signalé un texte, de l’espèce de ceux qui engendre à la fois la satisfaction d’une belle rencontre et la confusion d’une ignorance à l’abri de laquelle on croyait pouvoir s’attribuer un brin d’originalité |
✖ Via Le normal et le pathologique by Georges Canguilhem, PUF, coll. Quadrige, Paris, [1966] 2003, p. 171 You’ll find a review of the English translation for The normal and the pathological here. And here’s Canguilhem’s obituary by David Macey. |
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Aug 01 link notes
philosophy
originality
author
book
repetition
confusion
ignorance
wisdom
 | We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds. Sometimes we stand in wonder before a chosen object; we build up hypotheses and reveries; in this way we form convictions which have all the appearance of true knowledge. But the initial source is impure: the first impression is not fundamental truth. In point of fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has broken first with the immediate object, if one has refused to yield to seduction of the initial choice, if one has checked and contradicted the thoughts which arise from one’s first observation. |
✖ Via Psychanlyse of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, tr. A. C. Ross, Beacon Press, [1938]1987, p. 1 Here’s the original French text:
Il suffit que nous parlions d’un objet pour nous croire objectifs. Mais par notre premier choix, l’objet nous désigne plus que nous le désignons et ce que nous croyons nos pensées fondamentales sur le monde sont souvent des confidences sur la jeunesse de notre esprit. Parfois nous nous émerveillons devant un objet élu; nous accumulons les hypothèses et les rêveries; nous formons ainsi des convictions qui ont l’apparence du savoir. Mais la source initiale est l’impure: l’évidence première n’est pas une vérité fondamentale. En fait, l’objectivité scientifique n’est possible que si l’on a d’abord rompu avec l’objet immédiat, si l’on a refusé la séduction du premier choix, si l’on a arrêté et contredit les pensées qui naissent de la première observation. (éd. Gallimard, coll. Idées, Paris, [1938]1949, p. 9)
Gaston Bachelard was a French epistemologist. Learn more on Wikipedia. |
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Jul 26 link notes
communication
epistemology
objectivity
knowledge
separation
relation
perception
idea
world
reality
Bachelard
understand
stand
object
subject
impression
truth
science
philosophy
poetry
psychoanalysis
fire
Prometheus
mediation
media
immediate
observation
contradiction
 | There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. |
✖ Via Theses on the Philosophy in History (also On the Concept of History, from German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte) by Walter Benjamin, tr. Dennis Redmond, [1940]2001, §IX Here’s a French translation:
Il existe un tableau de Klee qui s’intitule Angelus Novus. Il représente un ange qui semble avoir dessein de s’éloigner de ce à quoi son regard semble rivé. Ses yeux sont écarquillés, sa bouche ouverte, ses ailes déployées. Tel est l’aspect que doit avoir nécessairement l’ange de l’histoire. Il a le visage tourné vers le passé. Où paraît devant nous une suite d’événements, il ne voit qu’une seule et unique catastrophe, qui ne cesse d’amonceler ruines sur ruines et les jette à ses pieds. Il voudrait bien s’attarder, réveiller les morts et rassembler les vaincus. Mais du paradis souffle une tempête qui s’est prise dans ses ailes, si forte que l’ange ne peut plus les refermer. Cette tempête le pousse incessamment vers l’avenir auquel il tourne le dos, cependant que jusqu’au ciel devant lui s’accumulent les ruines. Cette tempête est ce que nous appelons le progrès. (Source) |
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Jul 23 link notes reblogged from Christopher Butler
art
progress
philosophy
Benjamin
history
man
angel
past
present
future
destruction
catastrophe
order
chaos
tempest
 | ‘For me gravity doesn’t exist,’ said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. |
✖ Via The New York Times: “A Scientist Takes On Gravity” by Dennis Overbye, July 12th, 2010 In his paper, Dr. Verlinde never wrote “gravity doesn’t exist”. Instead, he wrote:
Note, however, that from our point of view the existence of gravity or closed strings is not assumed microscopically: they are emergent as an effective description. (“On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” PDF)
To say gravity doesn’t exist is one thing. To say it’s not real is something else. To say it’s an emergent phenomenon is yet another thing. In his New York Times essay, Dennis Overbye observes:
Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights. |
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Jul 15 link notes
technology
science
gravity
existence
reality
constructivism
philosophy
string theory
physic
thermodynamic
relativity
emergence
 | The ‘dark’ writer of the bourgeoisie, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville, always had an appeal for Max Horkheimer, who was influenced by Schopenhauer early in his career. These writers still thought in a constructive way; and there were lines leading from their disharmonies to Marx’s social theory. The ‘black’ writer of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche, broke these ties. In their blackest book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno joined with these writers to conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction. On their analysis, it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of enlightenment. Inspired by Benjamin’s now ironic hope of the hopeless, they still did not want to relinquish the now paradoxical labor of conceptualization. We no longer share this mood, this attitude. And yet under the sign of a Nietzsche revitalized by poststructuralism, moods and attitudes are spreading that are confusingly like those of Horkheimer and Adorno. I would like to forestall this confusion. |
✖ Via The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity by Jürgen Habermas, MIT Press, 1996, p. 106 Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville are “dark” writers (why?). Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche? Even darker : they are the “black” writers of the bourgeoisie. And Habermas? Habermas must be white. |
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Jul 07 link notes
communication
modernity
philosophy
Habermas
Hobbes
critic
critical theory
poststructuralism
Nietzsche
Sade
Machiavelli
Mandeville
Adorno
Horkheimer
hope
confusion
Enlightenment
 | The identity of an individual is a product of human reason: it is not anything other than a rational self. Therefore, losing identity equals losing reason. So ‘communicative cognition’ is cognition as an event which occurs in a (critical) moment not controlled by reason. It belongs to the realm of affect which transcends reason or occurs due to the drive of affect. According to Bataille, the sense of an individual losing identity is also what characterizes communication with the other. |
✖ Via Nami Ohi: “Cognition as Communication: The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille as a contribution to the study of Fundamental Informatics”, The New Trends of Socio-information in East Asia, Students’ workshop, at The University of Tokyo, Nov. 2007. [PDF]
“Nami Ohi is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies (GSIIS), the University of Tokyo, supervised by Prof. Toru Nishigaki. She studies literature from the systems theory perspective. She is especially interested in haiku and analyzes it by using fundamental informatics as a theoretical framework.” (more) |
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Jun 15 link notes
communication
philosophy
lost
loser
individual
subjectivity
identity
representation
Bataille
 | Oui, et le secret de mon fonctionnement se trouve aussi dans cette formule. Je n’ai jamais accepté le monolinguisme du discours, j’ai toujours privilégié une pluralité des langues. A mes yeux, la littérature n’est pas un instrument, c’est un milieu, et la prose philosophique admet un élément de lyrisme, comme chez Camus, que j’aime beaucoup depuis ma jeunesse. D’ailleurs, ma femme m’a souvent dit : “Il faut que tu écrives des romans ! Faire de la philosophie, c’est jeter de la confiture aux cochons !” J’ai essayé, en vain, de lui expliquer qu’écrire de la philosophie est ma réponse à la situation du roman moderne : comme la plupart des personnages du roman contemporain sont ennuyeux, mieux vaut raconter le destin passionnant des concepts - ce que j’ai fait dans ma trilogie Sphères. |
✖ Via Le Monde : “Pour être philosophe, il faut devenir un personnage de roman” by Peter Sloterdijk, interviewed by Jean Birnbaum, May 20, 2010. |
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Jun 10 link notes
art
philosophy
novel
author
fiction
science