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Footnotes From No One to No One but Necessary

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A couple footnotes to the end of this:

On the Coalescence and Convalescence of Power

(1) Error is the impossibility of objective, historical certainty in Kierkegaard. The shifting hermeneutic tide of historical narrative can only lead to profound dread not to concrete absolute. Logic, the faux fatale, the fatal blunder towards reduction while the grass grows under our feet is Error for demand, thought as ‘existing’. For Kierkegaard only the leap from Ethics to act without certainty can justify the act of Abraham. The abandonment of historical site and orientation in the act of the sacrifice of Isaac leaves one naked and without recourse, in hope against hope that in the abandonment of familial will the act of murder find redemption. In this act, passion is pitched to the infinite and the enormous burden of eternity rouses the forsaken soul. The absurd paradox without recourse and stripped of mortal certainty is the elevation from Ethics to the Religious.
(2) Ethics for Levinas is not the leap to the Religious conundrum but the an-archy of the face of the other, the impossibility of a synchronic time of me and him or her. Thus, Ethics is not a prescription of behavior but recognition of the absolute impossibility of ground, of root, of origin. Ethics is the possibility of the impossibility of totality, of summation, of Truth. Instead of abandoning Ethics, Levinas uproots the interpretation of Ethics as morality and exposes it as indebtedness that can never be paid; the for-the-sake-of-which cannot be named but only faced. Murder, the act of eradicating the other, is the ultimate narcissism of retreat from radical alterity. Representation, the violence of light, must continually re-present the other as mediated, as familiar, as taken together in my thought, this thought; a commensurate moment of concern. Even in the radical solitude of Kierkegaard’s faith God has not been abandoned. Even when and as God defies all objectivity God establishes subjectivity. The paganism of hule, matter has been replaced with the paganism of self…yet a still small voice speaks to me from the other. The relentlessness of final absolution from the one who faces me undoes my-self. The caress, the gesture, the voice that speaks breaks through as swells onto the sands of my times from whence these wind: Ethics?

Calling All Investigative Journalists…

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Are you looking for low hanging fruit for the Holidays? Here it is – the Attorneys General suit against the Federal Government for mandatory health care coverage. I sent an email to Attorney General Suthers back on April 1st, 2010 inquiring about the finances for their law suit (https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2010/04/01/my-email-to-the-attorney-general-of-colorado/). I never received a response but I did hear later on a news broadcast that they were only going to spend $5,000 of taxpayer’s money on that law suit. Folks, lawyers don’t wash their cars for $5,000. If you are an enterprising journalist that wants to make a mark on the national stage, it starts here – follow the money trail.

With all the rhetoric about government waste and debt, where is all the concern about this frivolous case. This lawsuit was sponsored by 12 Republican Attorneys General and one Louisiana Democrat, Attorney General. It has GOP written all over it. These are the same Attorneys General that sponsored the recent Republican “debate” on the topic (who do you think paid that bill?). When this case is ruled against by a conservative Supreme Court the journalist that did the local digging on the story is going national. When the case is overturned there will be a backlash against spending any amount of taxpayer money on such a political, partisan issue. Either Colorado will have spent much more than $5,000 on this rip off or we will find private GOP donors funding this wasted effort OR both. This is a win-win for an ambitious journalist.

Additionally, the Republicans are the authors of the mandatory requirement for health care debacle. Mitt and friends saw it as a boondoggle for insurance companies and were the first to start acting on it. Now that they have flip-floppers religion on the issue, they have over-extended their protest too much – more fodder for the fire. This is another start the de-regulation, wall street rip off/make the money on it and run/find religion for the working man/and give up the religion for the de-regulation cause again. The Republicans originated mandatory health care reform/started the law suit against it when it became law/ paid for the law suit with dubious and scandalous means/and now think they can bank on the issue politically in the next election. How can any investigative journalist sit back apathetically when so much up-side is at stake – red meat? There’s nothing like it for the Holidays!

All You Need to Know About Politics

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Here are the latest numbers:
Bush debt increase: 85%
Obama debt increase: 41%
Bush increase in unemployment: 98%
Obama decrease in unemployment:  8%

See for yourself…
From January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2009 the national debt increased from $5,727,776,738,304.64 to $10,626,877,048,913.08. For those that still believe in arithmetic this is an 85% increase in the debt over the Bush administration’s term ((10,626,877,048,913.08 / 5,727,776,738,304.64) * 100) = 185% or an 85% increase).

From January 20, 2009 to December 7, 2011 the national debt increased from $10,626,877,048,913.08 to $15,046,397,725,405.16. This is a 35% increase in debt over President Obama’s term ((15,046,397,725,405.16/ 10,626,877,048,913.08) * 100) = 141% or a 41% increase).

Don’t take my word for it, check it out on the US Treasury Department site at:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

When Bush took office on January 20, 2001, the national unemployment rate was 4.7%. When he left office on January 20, 2009 and President Obama took office the national unemployment rate was 9.3%
http://www.bls.gov/cps/prev_yrs.htm

The current unemployment rate as of December 2, 2011 is 8.6%
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Doing the math, the increase during the Bush administration was (9.3 / 4.7) * 100 = 198% or a 98% increase in unemployment. For the Obama administration the math is (8.6 / 9.3) * 100 = 92% or a 8% decrease in unemployment.

On the Coalescence and Convalescence of Power

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Chris Hayes made an argument on his MSNBC show “Up” that the Occupy movement demonstrates a more effective, inclusive form of government in their nightly town hall type discussions than is demonstrated in the “Super Committee” that was setup to address debt concerns.  He viewed the Super Committee as an example of elitist power broking.  While this apparent opposition certainly has its merit it also invites a more thoughtful analysis of the dynamics at play in this opposition.

To start, let’s think about the Up program.  Chris has guests on for segments and frequently replaces the guest with other guests.  While I am sure that all the guests would like to stay on for the whole program an executive decision is made based on limitation; time and relevancy prescribes the agenda.   In any organization a certain kind of economy must be preserved to maintain the viability of the organism.  Any democracy must harness the focus gained through the congealing of power to prioritize and preordain a practical solution to the problem of diffusion.  Diffusion is the dissolution of power, the breakdown of praxis, the convalescence of action.  Its ultimate political outcome is anarchy, the loss of origin, the opening onto infinity.   It is the potentiality for suspension of power, the pause of reflection, the existential moment (kairos) of suspension.

In any democracy an undercurrent of power must, of necessity, assert itself endlessly.  Democracy and power require a symbiosis, a tension of form (peros) and chaos (aperion) – an economy.  Power preserves the past.  It provides an ever changing narrative for relevance and origin.  It is the sustenance of purpose and affect.  It retains and bounds the infinite.  It scribes and pre-scribes a sophistical system of signs that gather together a pseudo ‘totalism’, a ‘worldhood’ wherein what comes-to-be is allowed or disallowed.

Democracy is the breakup of power.  It seeks to make the other relevant.  It is not a substitution of one kind of power for another but a kind of darkness that limits the circumspection of light.  Power, the virility of sight defines and limits.  It measures and retains.  Democracy breaks and recoils.  It casts dispersions on frame and reference.  It is the kairos that interrupts the succession of chronos (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/08/the-problem-of-logic/).   Democracy dissolves ‘heterogony’ and hierarchy and as such, is chaos, aperion, infinity.  It must always be taken hostage once again for production and re-assimilated into yet another moment (chronos), an occasion for, a repetition of economy.  Democracy cannot be in itself and power can.  Even as anarchy, power must certainly and inevitably re-inscribe, subjugate and define.   

Education, the sublime ideal preserved as Greek and taken up as enlightenment is the Academy that seeks to once again measure, the good and the sophistical, the better idea, the critical examination of “facts”, the hule of brute materiality, the eternal, the time proven retention of certainty.  Science, the fruit of scientific method, the proven of the profound, the indisputable of knowledge and the inclusion of democratic method has yet to fade from the germinated seed of Greek thought.  Education is the promise of preserved democracy, an economy of the truly true and the eternal beauty of Greek cheerfulness.  It asserts itself on the basis of ‘falsifiability’ as opposed to doxa and dogma.  It holds to the claim that the unaccountable other will be brought to account, settled in its infinity and preserved in its anarchistic totality – thus, the conundrum, the riddle of infinite concern, the passion for the absurd.  Education restores the living beauty that power idolizes and thus corrupts.  It is the good beyond being.  It promises unity in its manifold.  When all can be doubted only what cannot be doubted remains.  An educated electorate is the heroic and final destiny (telos) of democracy. 

The problem with the beatific vision of education is its substantive congealing of meaning.  Every great myth must re-produce itself in its destruction.  It is the gaze of Orpheus.  It must be a fetish-tic fascination for the infinite.  The clay feet of education thought in “Structures of Scientific Revolution” by Thomas Kuhn maintains a perpetual revolution of the same.  Inertia, the resistance to a change in momentum, is no stranger to education as congealing, convalescence and dissolution is the dunamis of power. 

Light can never finally preserve light in a greater light.  Light and the ‘presents’ that presence can only perpetually preserve its founding over and against its nemesis.  The pitched battle of form and chaos, peros and aperion, syntax and semantics can never be resolved into an ultimate unity.  Democracy can never win out against power.  Education cannot end, only promise.  Infinity, the other, cannot show itself as itself.  Truth can never proceed beyond the moment of appropriation, Ereignis.  In this malady of Error(1)* only Ethics(2)* as my responsibility to the other, my indebtedness to not-me, the voice that withdraws from monologue can hold in question the potency of power and the exasperation of light.

*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/21/footnotes-from-no-one-to-no-one-but-necessary/

The Obvious: Why have Republicans suddenly found religion on the national debt?

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First, let’s start with the obvious:

From January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2009 the national debt increased from $5,727,776,738,304.64 to $10,626,877,048,913.08.  For those that still believe in arithmetic this is an 85% increase in the debt over the Bush administration’s term ((10,626,877,048,913.08 / 5,727,776,738,304.64) * 100) = 185% or an 85% increase).

From January 20, 2009 to today July 12, 2011 the national debt increased from $10,626,877,048,913.08 to $14,343,010,710,537.58.  This is a 35% increase in debt over President Obama’s term ((14,343,010,710,537.58 / 10,626,877,048,913.08) * 100) = 135% or a 35% increase).

Don’t take my word for it, check it out on the US Treasury Department site at: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

So, in light of the simple math, why would anyone suggest that President Obama is big government and the Republicans are not?  This is patently absurd.  President Bush and the 6 year majority of Republicans  in the House of Representatives and the Senate went from the 4 year surplus that President Clinton left to record deficits and an 85% increase in the national debt.

No amount of groveling can erase this FACT so “man up” Repubs.

Myth 1: Republicans do not favor BIG Government.

Myth 2: Republicans favor tax cuts to create jobs.

Myth 3: Deregulation increases jobs

The first part of Myth 2 is true.  Bush cut the marginal tax rates across the income spectrum.  For those making over 1 million dollars a year the income taxed over $373,650 went from a marginal tax rate of 39.6% to 35%.  The lowest income bracket marginal tax rate went from 15% to 10%.  What is not true in Myth 2 is that the Bush tax cuts increased jobs.  It increased unemployment dramatically 98% as this post documents:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2011/07/08/the-obama-administration-raises-unemployment-25-really/

The national debt went up 85%.  We lost the four years of budget surplus that the Clinton administration gave us AND gained the stock market and mortgage market crashed as this post documents:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/10/14/how-george-bush-and-the-private-mortgage-market-created-the-perfect-storm/

The deregulation of the financial industry, oil and gas and product safety (and almost every other government regulatory function) was a disaster.  The private sector, unregulated market for credit default swaps went from 900 billion to 30 trillion dollars under President Bush.  The financial collapse under President Bush was the result of a 30 trillion dollar unregulated market based on junk mortgages.

Now, after the first African-American president the Republicans deem as “socialist” has actually turned the Republican nightmare of the Bush years around, Republicans are popping out of the the wood work with newly found religion on the national debt.  Where were these disciples during the Bush years?  Could it be that spending was ok when a Republican was doing it, at least judging from the rhetorical decibel level of their party, and now that Democrats “have the checkbook” they are fuming with moral debt rage?  This is two-faced and hypocritical.  It is a laughable elitism that was deferred in part by Dick Armey’s creation of the TEA party.  It was smart to off-load the most intense Republican anger with the Bush administration with a thinly veiled, far right wing group that will still vastly vote Republican.  They can in effect be Republican in their voting habits but fantasize that they are neither Republican nor Democrat.

In any case, I am encouraged by the rising sentiment in the Republican ranks against absurd wars and wish they had joined us during the most costly wars started in the Bush administration.

Across the board, Republican ideology has failed to live up to its essential claims AND historically proven themselves to have opposite consequences.  Their counter claims about what Democrats do to the economy have also proven themselves to be fabrications and historically unfound…oh for the days of the budget surplus and the 4.7% unemployment rate of the Clinton administration. ..I would also take the 2% decrease of unemployment under President Obama to the 98% increase under President Bush.

The only way to understand how the Republicans have succeeded in their claims is to understand how “marketing” or better yet “propaganda” can be used effectively to control voters.  They are the masters of propaganda, revisionist history and sophistry.  Their ideology of “free market based” survival of the fittest gives them the latitude to employ these techniques freely.  Democrats are much less adept at these practices.  They have more resistance to lying and manipulation built into their ideology and are generally awful at it when they try.  If the Republicans succeed, the crony capitalism that results will be disastrous for the masses that gave them the votes to do it and the “middle class” will continue to disappear.

As for me, I still maintain that there are facts that are not private and some statements can be deemed more historically accurate than others.  I hope I am not in the minority.

The Obama Administration Raises Unemployment 25% – REALLY?

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When Bush Junior took office on January 20, 2001, the national unemployment rate was 4.7%.  When he left office on January 20, 2009 and President Obama took office the national unemployment rate was 9.3% ( http://www.bls.gov/cps/prev_yrs.htm ).  The current unemployment rate as of June 2001 is 9.2% ( http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm ). Doing the math, the increase during the Bush administration was (9.3 / 4.7) * 100 = 198% or a 98% increase in unemployment.  For the Obama administration the math is (9.2 / 9.3) * 100 = 98% or a 2% decrease in unemployment.  The latest Karl Rove, Crossroads, national ad states that the national unemployment rate increased 25% during the Obama administration.  Since unemployment data by definition is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, no amount of “private facts” or bold face lies can explain away the real facts.  The Republican lie machine has no problem spending millions of dollars spewing forth unadulterated lies. 

Do these folks really think that sane voters would prefer a 98% unemployment rate increase to 2% percent decrease in unemployment?

Well, what about the long held theory that taxes cuts create jobs and help the economy.  We had 8 years to try this theory out.  Not only did it result in a 98% increase in unemployment but it also resulted in an economic crash and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.  Did it work?  Didn’t the Clinton administration end up with 4 years of a Federal surplus and a 4.7% unemployment rate?  Do voters really want to believe that if we try the Republican’s economic solution again it will work this time?  Are voters that stupid?

Well, what about health care and lassie faire?  We have tried decades of letting the market decide in the Republican promise that the market would solve the problem.  Did it work?  How much longer do we need to TRY the market based approach?  Ok, so let’s get rid of “Obama-care”…is the solution to go back to what we had before?  Was it so much better?  How many more decades do we need to try the market approach?  If we cut everyone off and get rid of the debt, are we willing to let men, women and children die in the streets from lack of health care while we satiate ourselves in our country clubs?  What is the solution?  Is there one?

The more interesting questions are:

1)      What kind of folks continue to spin out lies decade after decade to get and keep political power?

2)      Why does it seem to work?

When an ideology continually repeats lies to sustain and get power the word that describes it is “propaganda”.  The main purpose of propaganda is to manipulate.  There are two assumptions that propaganda proves out:

1)      Those that are have the money and power to create this marketing blitz are the elite “knowers”.  They are willing to do anything to obfuscate their true motives.  Their apparent contradictions are smoking mirrors cleverly designed to play on folk’s emotions and trick folks into supporting their true agenda – protecting the rich and powerful.  At the bottom of this machine is a pure Darwinian belief that power needs no justification, logic or truth.  Power is its own virtue.  Conquest proves who the blessed are and who the cursed are. 

2)      People are stupid.  They are “herdal” and cow-like.  They cannot remember the past and have no sense of logic and rationality.  They are zombies that can be manipulated and controlled by the elite.  They can be made to run straight off a cliff to their own demise and believe the whole time that it is in their best interest.

While the elite would never make such an explicit statement of their intentions, their actions leave no doubt as to what their game really is.  

I hope and want to believe they are wrong.  I want to believe in logic, rationality and history.  I would like to think that there is an intrinsic good in people that will overcome these schemes.  I can’t say that I do not have doubts and maybe the Darwinian instinct is correct.  However, if I were to believe this ideology I would find a certain meaninglessness and futility in existence.  Maybe we should “make friends with the enemy” as Apocalypse Now” maintains.  Maybe we should head straight of the cliffs and thank the wolves that made us believe we were doing it for our own good.  Well, as for me, I am willing to hope against hope, if that is what it takes, to adopt a more optimistic approach to human existence.  I suppose that this may be a kind of Kierkegaardian, existential staking out my “eternal happiness” on an absolute paradox…at least as thought from the dialectic of power.  These choices are left to us individually whether we explicitly know it or tacitly “do it”.  I find the belief that one is the “blessed” and “all-powerful” to be a comic tragedy of one’s own making in which the hero becomes the blind fool and forgets his end will be in the dust with his cows while the only thing that really mattered was humanity and concern, optimism and belief, the virtue of work – of harmony and balance with nature and logic, the scorned simplicity that faces us in the other.

Thoughts of Dread

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Re-reading Blanchot’s essay “From Dread to Language” and thinking of Kierkegaard’s concept of Dread there is a feeling I have of self-obsession.  Dread is the ultimate solipsism.  Exteriority abandons oneself in Dread and leaves one in a state of irrecoverable and unsalvageable narcissism.  The impending doom of an absolute immediate moment that cannot be intervened, mediated away and requires the blank death-like stare of Medusa’s face.  Nothing can emerge from Dread and nothing can escape its orbit.  Its event horizon refuses meaning, love, concern…otherness.  It encapsulates and seals in tomb-like devotion.  It is the mark of Death.  Life requires that one escapes and flees in the face of Dread; that one is not swallowed into its catacombs.  In Dread, life dreams. In the face of Dread, life requires awareness, movement away-from, emersion in otherness. 

Dread, while incapable of exteriority, mimics absolute exteriority.  It is as if the gaze of Dread paralyzes and stupefies while only bare consciousness is imprisoned in concretized death.  The eyes cannot even blink only behold the site of Dread in emptiness.  When life is encapsulated in death movement is always from without.  As a marionette, movement is hollow and initiated as pure externality.  When inwardness is raised to the infinite in Dread its absolute emptiness is exposed, raw and abysmally hollow.  The result of absolute inwardness is absolute exteriority, mechanical, Frankenstein-like.  It is the tornado-like act of god that can only consume itself, without ever knowing an end, as pure dread.  Dread is all and in all, unabashed and without form.  Form is the refuge life would take in the face of Dread.  Form flees from formlessness.  Life must always rise from the bog of Dread.  The moment of mechanical exteriority must create a silhouette, a form.  Thus language, meaning and sense must usher one from the gaze of Dread.   The escape must create world, history…a shadow of the mechanical exteriority that faces it.  In this then is the interlocutor, the mediation…the drunkenness of oblivion. 

Oblivion here is not abstract extinction.  It is release from ill y a, the meaningless background noise of existence.  It is the moment of breath, the sacrament of defilement.  It raises the exteriority imposed by Dread into a false god, a simulacrum of its tormentor.  In this way life can ‘face’ Dread, get a handle on it, and make it other than what it is…bare ‘isness’.  With this then is the third person.

The third person is the narrator, the voice of god, the chorus of tragedy.  The third person is not a he or a she but an ‘it’.  It is the oracle that gathers and holds.  It sanctifies by stealing away the moment of Dread.  It is the neuter, the thing.  It truncates the absolute emptiness of dread into an abject object.  As ‘suchness’, the thing resonates and glimmers in effervescent release.   Life therefore becomes the retreat from the stymied death of Dread.

In all this a map is traced of syntax and semantic, infinite orthogonality…the trace the can never be untied from the knot of existence.  It can only be reaffirmed in its obscurity.  This then is oblivion. 

At this point Levinas might take a turn.  Could it be that the gazes of Dread is none other than the face of the other.  The other not as something I know or am familiar with but as the puppeteer the marionette can never know, shed light on, see and perceive.  Why must Dread get its birth from nothingness and self-petrifaction?  If Levinas is right, the absolute alterity of the other that can never be ‘mine’ or even recuperable as in ‘my’ time, a temporal ecstasies, take on the truncated form of a thing, can make Dread the expression of absolute impotency, infinitely more passive than passivity.   The negativity of form yet rests on form.  However, the notion of alterity that Levinas may be hinting at may only show itself as an unnoticed breeze through autumn’s fall, the sadness of my love’s passing, a ghostly clearing in the wood where sun-filled rays go unnoticed.  In the excess, the abundance of this alterity a glimmer of grace eclipses the gaze of Dread, a still small voice that easily goes unnoticed plays around the moment of death…and children play while Dread takes its last breath.

Another Start? (Updated 3/28/11, comments)

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Why must Hegel’s Logic start with freedom? Freedom is not presupposition-less. Freedom means free. Free assumes a move away, a compulsion for dunamis; not dunamis for the sake of dunamis but dunamis as repulsion or attraction. Hegel thinks freedom as immediacy, ‘isness’. Because of freedom, immediacy wants what ‘isness’ isn’t – mediation. Two terms have appeared: freedom, ‘isness’ (immediacy). These two work together to lose themselves, objectify, mediate. ‘Isness’ is a rootedness, a dwelling, a place. As Kant’s monistic subject, we have place, immediacy. Immediacy may be boundless or bounded but it assumes locality and awareness of locality. It is easy to see how things proceed from this ‘there’, the ‘there’ of immediacy. In any case, assumptions are made about ‘isness’ (i.e., ‘isness’ must be free of itself). Since we make this assumption at the start, why not another? Instead of freedom, why not evocation? Instead of ‘isness’, why not other? Why can’t ‘isness’ presuppose other, the evocative that evokes ‘isness’? Why can’t evocation call ‘isness’ to immediacy? Why couldn’t freedom be a misunderstanding of evocation, dunamis from evocation? Certainly immediacy ‘is’ and as such, a start. However, this start may carry with it its logos. Its arche is certainly self-determination, itself. Could self-determination be an assumption given as a determination of immediacy? Are there other determinations that could be made? Would another direction, a logos, be possible from an other determination? Certainly an other does not appear in immediacy but how could it (and still be other in Levinas’ sense)? What determinations could be sustained if immediacy is ‘isness’ or ‘otherness’? Certainly ‘isness’ comes from nothing other than itself in its “pure immediacy” but “nothing other than itself” is already a tautological identity based on the “nothing other”. “Pure immediacy” absolutely negates other. Within this arche the other must fall out as mediated, as ad hoc from immediacy. Immediacy is pure negation. All its conditions reside in itself and thus, fail. Is this what is called ‘freedom’ or the impetus for freedom? What if all the conditions for immediacy reside in the other and ‘isness’ is called to be from what it isn’t? Is this a presupposition or another initial determination? Why presuppose a self-determination based on a ‘sense’ of immediacy? Is this automatically apparent, aprioir, assumed without self-criticism? If the Hegelian start is made by assuming that immediacy is self-determined, feels empty of other, then a decision, a determination, in kairos has been made. It may be that the moment of kairos, thought as immediacy, holds other options that require a very different ‘working out’, another start.

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9/10/10

Does the reification of the immediate reflect a certain kind of privileged, existentiell ‘there’ of being? Isn’t the start of Hegel a certain kind of mode of dasein’s being-in-the-world? Isn’t it when dasein is introspective, aware of nothing other than his or her own stark existence? Immediacy as discussed by Hegel occurs when no one is around, when one is intensely focused on oneself, and dasein is isolated from others. I suppose one could maintain that this stark, isolated, existentiell modality is ‘always’ there in some sense but that is a bit of a stretch.(1) Could it be that this thought is a ‘scientific’ assertion (doxa) of how dasein really is? When dasein is with others (mitsein) the ‘there’ is not dominated by hermetic and hermeneutic isolation (unless one is depressed). In everyday interaction with others, attending plays or sports events and perhaps watching a live entertainment broadcast, dasein is immersed in a kind of shared moment, a communal ‘now’, with others. Ontically, the “I” does not show itself but the “we”. The “I” does not dominate existentielly. The experience is not like anxiety where beings withdraw or instrumentality where dasein is engaged in work and not over and above him/herself. The experience is of a kind of shared ‘I’, a ‘we’, with others, the ‘now’ moment (immediacy) is not mine but ours. It seems to me that the kind of privileged (the beginning of the Logic?) and self-absorbed immediacy of Hegel is reified over and against the other ways that dasein ontically is in-the-world. What is the self-critical justification for this start? Is this a tradition brought about by the hermetic environment of academia? It seems to me that Hegel assumes immediacy is the moment of moments that all other moments get their oxygen from at least in the rarified atmosphere of academia. Has anyone ever even questioned this specifically? Probably but I am not currently aware of it. It seems to me that the start determines the path and the end. Why this start and not another? Is Hegel’s start supposed to be self-evident? (2)

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Notes:

(1) A thought…could the immediacy of Hegel have something in common with the concept of dread in Kierkegaard?

(2) It seems to me, this is yet another example of the sophistry that enters philosophy when philosophers become ‘professional’ and are paid for their ‘career’. It conglomerates and congeals, stupefies and specializes into a lifetime of having a financial stake in the game of apologetics. Sadly, I have seen it ruin the love of philosophy in several people. Could it be argued that this is one example of the alienation that Marx thinks is capitalism?

Forgive the Personal Indulgence…

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I recently found out that I have arterial calcification that puts me in a bracket where only 23% of folks my age have it worse.  I always knew my days were numbered but would rather longer than shorter.  In any case, I plan to go out the same way I came in with wonder and beauty…and incessant crying. 😉

In Response to a Blog on Tautology…

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“Raw significance is sent to the mind through the senses, through apperception (and what Husserl called ‘the play of fancy’), and also through introspective reflection and contemplation . It is a call to which consciousness of conscious individuals is *called* to (ostensibly) present a conceptually reciprocal and orderly answer to.”

I appreciate the subtlety of your reasoning.  I would only add a tidbit…

Do we ever actually encounter “raw significance”?  Isn’t it always bundled with ‘awareness’, an inextricable web of meaning, of manifold significances?  It may be that ‘raw significance’ is an abstraction.  If so, the questions that press to the fore are political…why would we want to denude the way we find ourselves already engaged in ‘worldhood’ as Heidegger may suggest or Husserl’s horizon?  Why would an abstraction of experience be deemed a suitable substitution for how meaning, sensations, being show themselves?  Perhaps, as Heidegger notes, it is because we are historical beings.  Our truths are never pure and naked tautologies but always clothed in the garbs of circumstance, the accidental, the fullness of the moment (kairos), semblance.  This would make the incidental not circumspect but always already there with, essential to the founding of truth.  To separate tautology from NOT tautology is always already to have never departed from tautology.   It is to re-pronounce the ancient incantation of Parmenides and Plato the one over the many, the eternal over the mortal, mind over body and the other countless ways this has redeemed itself in history.  Yet, the still small voice remains, the voice we think as incidental and unnecessary, the other that has not yet succumbed to tautology.  This is how we find ourselves and ethics is the choice of force or détente.