Walter Lippmann

Yet another book that I first read around age 16 and that had a profound effect upon the way that I continue to think is Walter Lippmann's A Preface to Morals (1929).

Like Wallace Stevens, Lippmann was a student of George Santayana. He also studied with William James. His thought displays an interesting confluence of those two Harvard colleagues.

From reading Lippmann I discovered that, while modernity is a fact, modernism is an ideal. I am not certain that Lippmann himself was very clear on the distinction, but his very lack of clarity may have made the distinction obvious to me. It is for this reason that I have long cherished Bruno Latour's observation that "We have never been modern." My riff on Latour is that all of us are modern--whether we like it or not--but few of us are modernists, i.e., are among those who have considered the advantages and disadvantages of modernity (casting a cold eye on both) and have made conscious choices about what to embrace and what to resist in the modern condition.

Reading Lippmann's Preface convinced me that modernist religion need not be rational, but it must be reasonable. Moreover, his discussion of "high religion" as a modern, humanistic mode makes the case (possibly without knowing it) that tasawwuf has all the credentials it needs to be the modernist religion par excellence.

As Lippmann himself would say: "The stone that the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner" (Luke 20:17).

That Wily Dervish, Jacques Derrida

John Caputo has labored a lifetime to interpret that wily Dervish, Jacques Derrida.

Word.

Two Books In My Personal Canon

One never knows, when picking up a book and reading it, what impact it will have over the course of a lifetime--especially a life lived, as mine has been, among books. I have long acknowledged the importance of Robert Bretall's A Kierkegaard Anthology, first read when I was sixteen, to my intellectual formation.

I still have my original copy of the book with its yellowed pages and now-faded highlighting.

A book I read subsequent to Bretall was William Barrett's Irrational Man; I may have been seventeen by the time I began to work my way through Barrett.

For some reason, I tend not to credit Barrett's book as I should. This may be because Barrett offered an interpretation of "existential philosophy," whereas Bretall's Anthology provided me with primary source material.

Yet, picking up Barrett's book again--with its red ink underlining and cracked spine--I find myself pulled back in time, into the strange thrill I felt when I first encountered the Sartrean mantra "existence precedes essence."

Why did such an assertion strike me, at the time, as so powerful, so profound? Like many American adolescents of the mid-to-late 1970's, I was ambivalently rebellious but definitely restless: frustrated and alienated by my bourgeois upbringing in the suburbs of a post-War industrial capital. But why should Sartre's simple (some might argue simplistic) summation of Heidegger's attempt to turn the history of European metaphysics on its head "speak" to my condition?

It is baffling to consider how deep was the impact of that phrase--especially baffling in light of the fact that, at the time, I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the history of European metaphysics. I knew only Kierkegaard's almost pathological rejection of Hegelian system: but that, too, had struck me as unerringly on target.

Perhaps the appeal of these books and the ideas to which they introduced me lay in the message that I, as a restless adolescent, took from them:

Your situation here is temporary and, in any event, is an accident of birth. You are not stuck here, nor is your ultimate fate determined. If you do not yet know who you are, it is because who you are has not yet been decided. Existence precedes essence. You are not yet who you shall become...

Such a message was gospel to me; it was a source of strength and of hope (not, as many seem to read the message of Existentialism, one of despair). It taught me that my feelings of alienation were perfectly natural--and that those who did not share them were probably in for a rude awakening at some point in the future.

Of course, the irony is that, nearly four decades on, the same message continues to reverberate in my consciousness: You are not yet who you shall become...

But, at this point, "who I shall become" no longer interests me: for "I" no longer interest me--at least not in the obsessive, self-absorbed manner of the modern American adolescent.

Anarchist Spirit

Spots of Time

William Wordsworth - There Are In 0ur Existence... by poetictouch

Heidegger On Romanticism

Romanticism has not yet come to its end. Romanticism attempts once again a transfiguration of beings, which as re-acting against the thorough explaining and calculating strives only to evolve beyond or next to this explaining or calculating. This transfiguration "calls upon" the historical renewal of "culture," urges its rootedness in the "people," and strives for communication to everyone. GA 65, 496; 1999, 349.

In other words, for Heidegger, the Romantic "re-action" to our modern Weltnacht did not go far enough. Even so, as Pol Vandevelde argues in his Heidegger and the Romantics (Routledge, 2012), Heidegger's desire to "do something more radical than romanticism" does not exclude the possibility that he "[built] upon the romantic project and [attempted] to offer the ontological foundation, the [Stiftung] of this romanticization" (15).

Vandevelde's use of the German term "Stiftung" (misprinted in the text as "Sitftung") translates in English as "foundation," but it connotes the kind of foundation that involves an endowment or donation (as in the English phrase "charitable foundation"). Understood in this fashion, we have to do with a more consistently Heideggerian notion than "foundation" in the sense of a base or basis. The Stiftung is an act of generosity, not an immovable rock upon which to build a church.

Balzac

Why he matters.

Heideggerian Restlessness

"Heidegger's thinking does not come to rest. Each time we believe we have finally arrived at the goal and prepare to latch onto it we are thrown into a new interrogation. Every resting point is shaken. What seemed to be the end and goal becomes a departure for renewed questioning. If Descartes sought an unshakable foundation for philosophizing, Heidegger tries to put precisely this foundation in question."

--Walter Biemel, Heidegger, pp. 8-9.

The Heidegger Stone

"To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky."

Thus did Heidegger think, and such was his accomplishment: a body of work that stands still in the philosophical world's sky like a "Rosetta" stone--a device that enables the translation of the Western philosophical canon (Plato to Kant) from metaphysical speculation (the search for substance or a bedrock of "whatness" or quiddity called "Being") into a new, and different, direction of thought and practice. Heidegger abandoned the presiding pretense of Western metaphysics (that there is an Archimedean standpoint upon which one may place a philosophical lever to "move the world") and adopted, instead, a more humble prospect: a new place from which to pose the question of how things hang together. The move from "what" to "how" is the true hallmark of Heideggerian genius.

The greatest difficulty with Heidegger's project is encountered in his insistence on pouring this new wine into old wineskins: he does not abandon the old metaphysical vocabulary (a la Wittgenstein) but attempts to invest it with new significances. The result of this strategy is much tortured prose. The most important prerequisite of Heidegger studies is perseverance. Through perseverance, the stone that the builders rejected becomes the chief corner stone.

The Heideggerian Republic

Heidegger bids us to enter "the clearing"--the place where we no longer impose upon the found world our own notions of how that world is "supposed" to "hang together" (to be). He acquired this ideal from his teacher Husserl and held on to it tenaciously throughout his life. He bids us to abandon the will-to-power over nature (i.e., our heavy reliance upon modern technology) and texts (i.e., interpretative schemes that amount to little more than special pleading for inherited dogmas). He admonishes us to have faith in Being itself (the world's own way of "worlding"). He asks us to see the world with renewed wonder. In the Heideggerian republic, poets rule and philosophers are banished. In the Heideggerian republic, phenomenology is king.