Archiv der Kategorie: Magazin

Hier erscheint Vermischtes, Interessantes und Triviales.

a.m. 6.8.92 voices from the past

Pretentious philosophs. They bear the unsubstantiated idea, out of premature pseudo-analysis, that an I is a solipsistic impulse. That I, frequently, disregard the councel of rationale, skirt self-reflection. Not so. Perhaps partially correct. But the decision to act on impulse and intuition does not suggest lack of reasoning potential or lack of reasoning (cogitare). Neither is a decision to act on impulse a contradiction in terms. For the self-aware it is a conscious choice. (Of course one may argue whether opting for intuition, a conscious decision to go with the gut-feeling, is an absurd concept in itself, as the preceding deliberation negates impulsivity; that impulse is a fairy-land beyond reason, where reason dare not dwell or enter.)

Friendship. An encumbering self-reenactment, escape. It is into them – our friends – we drain our sewage, (dump the debris) of (noxious sentiments) and doubts we cannot (otherwise) cleanse ourselves of. It is a sad metaphore. In general that is what occurs. As it is a rare phenomenon, a fluke, when friendship is a mutual enrichment; usually, it is a theft and friends are thieves. Thieves who ransack and pillage one’s emotions, take advantage of the gullible benignity, (selflessness) – the likeness, the optimistic faith of and in humanity as the last and only resort. I speak of abusive, insatiable taking, the theft, an albeit amiable, (sanctioned) theft. (Of course one may argue whether a sanctioned theft is a theft at all. Is yielding really giving? Or just a surrender, acquiescing to being mugged out of guilt and kindness, to being colonized and harassed out of the antidote of pride, to being raped and robbed out of an overestimation of character strength and delusive generosity?) And the true friendship, platonic and heterosexual, must then be a deliberate effort for mutual benefit, a transactional equilibrium, sensitive and intuitive, entailing an insight and respect for boundaries and an acute awareness of tact and acceptance. Acceptance and trust in kind judgement of the other’s potential for expedience or utility.

Books 2024

Lisa Feldman Barrett Wie Gefühle entstehen SB **
Simon Blackburn Truth: Ideas in Profile SB ***
Simon Blackburn On Truth SB ***
Joan Didion let me tell you what i mean FIC *****
Tess Gunty Rabbit Hutch FIC *
Юрій Лавріненко РОЗСТРІЛЯНЕ ВІДРОДЖЕННЯ (Sammelband)****
George Luckyj Ukrainian Literature in the twentieth Century: a Reader’s Guide SB **
Olena Palko Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin SB *
Serhii Plokhy The Russo-Ukrainian War (audio) SB ***
Timothy Snyder On Tyranny SB ***
Adrienne Stone, Frederick Schauer The Oxford Handbook of Freedom of Speech SB ***+N
Dana Villa Hannah Arendt: A Very Short Introduction SB ****
Asako Yuzuki Butter FIC ***
Matthias Hammer Der Feind in meinem Kopf SB **
Ragnar Jónasson Death at the Sanatorium DF ***
Deborah Feldman Judenfetisch AB/SB ***
Simone de Beauvoir The Blood of Others FIC ***
John Passmore The end of philosophy? PHIL ****
Volker Gerhardt (Hrsg.) Eine angeschlagene These, Die 11. Feuerbach-These im Foyer der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin SB ****

Currently reading/listening

Matthias Freise Slawistische Literaturwissenschaft Eine Einführung SB
Serhii Plokhy The Gates of Europe SB
Peter Baehr The Portable Hannah Arendt SB
Gottlob Frege Der Gedanke PHIL
Peter Singer Marx: A Very Short Introduction SB
Mark Edmundson Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida – A Defence of Poetry SB
K. Marx, F. Engels Das Kapital SB HIST
Bernard O’Donoghue Poetry: A Very Short Introduction SB
Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet FIC
Colin McGinn Problems in Philosophy the Limits of Inquiry SB PHIL
W. A. Suchting MARX AND PHILOSOPHY Three Studies SB PHIL

8:23 8 11 23

For posterity, wripped into neat squares. But maybe, thousand years from now, a little piece will endure the rot and find its way into the hands of an archeologist, who will attempt to decipher the neurotic script, the disarray of thoughts and try to find meaning, where there is none.

dear reader of the future, study not these scribblings – i am merely cleaning the drive – making room for new, for better thoughts. And everywhere now, in this our age of intellectual significance, when nothing is banal and everthing is cherished, there is so much. i sometimes feel, in my head there is no fillable real-estate left – everthing is peopled with throw-away information and like a hoarder, I tremble compulsively when forced to dismiss, discard and disown, judge or discriminate between what to chuck and what to cherish. Like Saunders, who, i am certain, is rigorous. his rigor albeit concerns the written and not the thought. is any conjured path wrong? can it be judged? or is the pattern created lost or works not on the level of detail but as a net – there is no pattern, only the function of the holding everthing together, the sound structure, not the individual units.

My mind wanders off. patience has evaporated or has been trimmed away. time is the tyrant who commands and rules solitary. the straight arrow to the bull’s eye of result. there is no bench to sit upon and rest and play, and feed the pigeons – every thought is scrutinized according to its function, its utility. and if deemed useless, i do chuck it. well, maybe not thoughts, but definitely dust collectors like people. they squat on the prime real-estate of time. time, of which there is plenty and which lies desolate and unpopulated, as it were.

but is time not mine to do with as i like? just as thoughts? it is my slave and serves me. no other shall have it lest i give it freely. but.

and language is there to be used and it lives and dies. pehaps dictionaries, like museums, similarly hoard species long extinct. very much so. but astounding relics of the past nevertheless mirror back to us images of our ancestors, as our extinct word-species will, at some point, have a needle in them, powdery, mummified, speciments that future generations will study with the desire to understand, reconstruct, but will never. because in the little note near the word-specimen they will read – „used during…“, or „from the epoch of…“. and they will never understand, because its use has become obsolete, in all the manifold ways obsolence occurs.

And is there, or am i such a child, an old child of modernity, who is useless, is dust at best? can one reconstruct a picture out of dust, a substance that will explain or help explain? Sure, nothing is useless – perhaps is useless dust not at all useless – perhaps it is filling up a space that would otherwise have been a vaccuum and then there would be a conjecture and a question mark at best. but the dust points to something – saying or embodying a sign, a hint – there was! there was something. a proof of not nothing. there was someone who – someone who thought something – someone who said something. and this dust is your parent or ancestor of those future thoughts.

time features promenently now. why? before, even a couple of years before, i need not stray too far back, not one thought of time, no awareness of its existence. what time means now–then it was whim – the egocentric whim that reigned over all. not when, but want. to whim i knelt before. now – a humble subject of time.

cleaning the dust collected on the thought-shelves, stacks of thoughts in the corners, piled one upon another, with a thin layer of emotion between them, like rice paper or wax paper, browned and leathery what once was seemingly, poignantly alive, so prickly and ardent. the mental lists make me weary and it doesn’t help to bring them to paper. when i cast my eyes on the rows of musts, exhaustion ensues, the sand kernel by sand kernel growing mountain of musts, overwhelming and humbling me, having not yet ventured on the uphill journey.

is the child dying into an adult? the child who just is, just does, just wants now, who cares not for utility, who has no direction, like time, it lives in one and all the dimensions of the eleven-dimensional world of its own capricious design, or on the plane of designlessness – just the will to see, to be curious, the will just…

from here

from here
we cannot see the harbor,
where a vendor – hoarse and reeking,
sings,
and whores – gray and foreign
drift, 
gossiping of fishy things,
along the creaking gangplank.

bottles bob, barrels roll
miles of mesh lie limp and waste
windless years –
on the creaking gangplank. 

in this vast paradise – 
horizonless and edgeless –
we are bunched up 
in the middle of our dinghy.
i raise my hand above your head 
at midday.

Like father…

In his whimsical autobiography, H.G. Wells – detailing his family’s history – claims that his father, while in service as a gardener, stood model for the sneaking youth in the painting The Maid and the Magpie by Sir Edwin Landseer.

„…a frequent visitor at Redleaf was Sir Edwin Landseer, the „animal painter,“ …who did those grave impassive lions at the base of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square. My father served as artist’s model on several occasions, and for many years he was to be seen in the National Gallery,… But afterwards the Landseers were all sent to the Tate Gallery at Millbank and there a sudden flood damaged or destroyed most of them and washed away that record of my father altogether.

this here

will the momentum of puberty’s paroxysms suffice to persist in the investigation? and truth and wisdom – arbitrary, spacious, elusive and implacable? is there consolation? how to endure the tears from the stinging light, the tears of epiphany…the bliss of grasping, even for a moment, a meaning, or an idea, but not consciously, but with the soul and mind and senses.

truth demanded many lives, of men worthier than i. and with my social suicide I join them, if only thus – still meek and doubting, fearful and selfish, still glancing back nostalgically, at the other life – so snug, so peaceful. and so false.

that there

mystery. magic. puzzles – riddles. secrets. arcane or prosaic. like the horizon: blue-sky, taunting and intimidating. the unknown. the unknowable, yet explained and evident. although I understand, I nonetheless acknowledge its deceitful existence – there it is, I see it and how, then, I ask increduously, can it be a concept, just an idea and not a thing – this, that I see. imperceptibly moving forward, like time – it too, just a figment.

or love. like horizon’s edge, endlessly stretched (like giacometti’s limb) between me and that life, the mirage is measured into existence, as a formula, or seized by a stanza: there – you point at it – there, can you not see it? can you not believe in it? and then, reason, with a slightly raised eyebrow, strokes my childish head with its pitiless palm and says: no, dear child, it is only an illusion.

Schicksal

Was? Ein Essay zum Thema Schicksal von mir? Warten wir’s ab!

Die nachfolgenden Überlegungen basieren auf einem Comic von Zach Weinersmith auf der Webseite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal [1], welches ich mit dem Begriff Schicksal in Verbindung gebracht habe. Vor der Verschriftlichung habe ich diese Überlegungen in privaten Diskussionen entwickelt.

Der Schicksalsbegriff ist gemäß Wikipedia [2] unterschiedlich belegt und reicht von einer (göttlichen) a-priori-Festlegung des menschlichen Werdegangs bis zur Vorstellung, dass der Mensch seine Zukunft selbst in der Hand habe.

Im Comic von Weinersmith wird postuliert, dass sich einem Menschen zu jedem Zeitpunkt unendlich viele Möglichkeiten eröffnen. Er vergleicht das Leben mit einem Weg, den man geht, und auf dem man mit jedem Schritt eine von unendlichen vielen Weggabelungen wählt. Das Verfließen der Zeit bestimmt die Geschwindigkeit der Wanderung, deren Richtung – nach vorne – man nicht beeinflussen kann [3].

Hierbei darf man nicht dem landläufigen Irrtum aufsitzen, dass unendlich viele Möglichkeiten mit allen Möglichkeiten gleichzusetzen seien [4]. Aufgrund einer früheren Entscheidung, einem Abzweig den Vorzug zu geben, sind unendlich viele Möglichkeiten weggefallen, die sich hinter den anderen Abzweigungen befanden. Während ein Vierjähriger noch ggf. die Wahl hat, Lokomotivführer oder Astronaut zu werden, hat der 50jährige Lokomotivführer nicht mehr die Möglichkeit, Astronaut zu werden. Wer einmal den Weg von Frankfurt nach Berlin eingeschlagen hat, wird nicht mehr nach Paris reisen.

Unter Schicksal verstehe ich die Einschränkung der persönlichen Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten in der Zukunft durch Entscheidungen in der Vergangenheit. Auf der Wanderung bestimmen die bereits genommenen Abzweigungen die noch möglichen Ziele, da auf dem Pfad eine Reise zurück nicht möglich ist.

Diese Definition ist wertneutral.

Ob das Schicksal günstig oder ungünstig ist, hängt dabei dann wesentlich davon ab, ob man in der Vergangenheit aus persönlicher Sicht rückbeschauend richtig oder falsch abgebogen ist. Ich will hier jedoch keinesfalls einer fatalistischen Einstellung das Wort reden: auch in einer insgesamt eher ungünstigen Lage gibt es zumeist in den unendlich vielen Möglichkeiten immer auch Pfade zu einem positiven Ziel im eigenen Wertesystem. Wer in der Jugend einen Weg gewählt hat, der ihn unglücklich gemacht hat, hat ein weniger günstiges Schicksal, aber kommendes Glück ist ihm dadurch nicht verwehrt, wenn er künftig die richtigen Abzweigungen wählt.

Man mag nun vollkommen zu Recht einwenden, dass man ja nicht alle, noch nicht einmal die meisten Entscheidungen bewusst oder selbst trifft. Im Laufe der Zeit ergeben sich die Wege oft zufällig oder man wird wider Willen in eine Abzweigung geschubst. Gerade diese Betrachtung unterstützt aber den gewählten Schicksalsbegriff nur, da sie den Aspekt der Willkür und den beschränkten eigenen Einfluss auf den eigenen Werdegang untermauert. In wie weit also das eigene Schicksal unveränderlich ist oder sich durch einen selbst beeinflussen lässt, ist somit eine Frage der Wahlmöglichkeiten bzw. der Anstrengungen, die man in die Auswahl der Pfade setzt. Häufig lässt sich das erst beim Blick in den Rückspiegel beurteilen. „Ach hätte ich nur….!“

Beginnt das Schicksal mit der Geburt? Nein! Jeder von uns ist der gegenwärtige Endpunkt einer seit Jahrmilliarden andauernden Entwicklung. Unser Schicksal ist bestimmt durch das unserer Eltern, deren Pfad wir weiter beschreiten. Und durch die Pfade unserer Großeltern und aller unserer Vorfahren. Wir sind Menschen nur, weil sich das Leben auf der Erde seit Entstehung der ersten DNS auf einem bestimmten Pfad entwickelt hat, weil das Universum seit dem Anbeginn eine Entwicklung genommen hat.

Begreift man Schicksal rückwärtsgerichtet als die Einschränkung der Zukunft durch vergangene Ereignisse, ist es für das eigene Handeln lediglich in soweit relevant, als dass es die unveränderlichen Rahmenbedingungen festlegt, innerhalb derer der Mensch die Freiheit hat, aus unendlich vielen Möglichkeiten zu wählen und die Chancen zu nutzen, den Weg in seine bestmögliche Zukunft zu wählen.


[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/potential-2

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schicksal

[3] Als Freund der Many-Worlds-Interpretation der Quantenmechanik ist mir diese Betrachtung besonders sympathisch, siehe z.B. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/

[4] Die Geschichte von Hilberts Hotel hilft zu verstehen, dass eine echte Teilmenge einer unendlichen Menge unendlich groß sein kann. Von den zahlreichen Nacherzählungen im WWW scheint mir diese am bekömmlichsten: https://www.sapereaudepls.de/sonstiges/unendlichkeit/hilberts-hotel/