reflections about the art of reflecting…
Modern art emerged during the end of realism or the crisis of representation (Cezanne, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism). Realism is defined as the mirror theory of knowledge where the mind is a mirror of reality and objects that exist independently of the mind are represented (reproduced by a concept/work of art) adequately, accurately and true. Continue reading genealogy of modern art
Philosophy is notorious for subjecting itself to withering criticism, and that is precisely where philosophy progresses. For some philosophers, the critique of philosophy is also the very essence of philosophy. Jean Hyppolite interprets Hegel by saying “philosophical discourse contains its own criticism within itself.” Then, philosophical critique is inescapable, or, the discourse of philosophy cannot be isolated and insulated from a critique of any kind.
Jacques Derrida, in his seminal Of Grammatology: “Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.” (P. 24) The deconstruction of philosophy merely unpacks the methods and logic and propositions employed by philosophers, yet this unpacking is always already unpacking, that is, rearrange the methods and reformat the logic and re-institute the propositions.
Since philosophy is self-referential, then the effort to define the founding conditions of philosophical truth from a purely objective position outsie of philosophical discourse is necessarily doomed to fail. Derrida inspects what the structures of philosophical texts contains in order to trace the hidden/excluded/repressed history/folks/concepts of western philosophical discourse as its founding conditions of possibility.
“My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank, not at an individualistic morality” Will to Power, 287
Nietzsche’s political thinking remains a source of confusion as well as embarrassment for most scholars seeking to appropriate conceptual tools, largely because they tend to be incongruous with the standard liberal ways of thinking about politics, which have prevailed for the past 200 years. In political thought, Nietzsche departs from liberalism in a number of ways:
Much like liberalism, Nietzsche’s conception of politics is instrumental, but it differs radically from the liberal in his valuation of human life. Whereas for liberalism politics is a means towards peaceful coexistence of individual agents, for Fritz it is a means for human greatness. Fritz is committed to ‘perpetual self overcoming’ and the ‘enhancement of man.’ This enhancement does not consist of improving of the conditions of life for the majority of people, but in the generation of few striking superlatively vital ‘highest exemplars’ of the human species. The production of magnificent specimens is possible only in a society politically organized along strict hierarchical lines.
On my (now defunct) boards, a Hyperborean asked the following:
Do you see it as a critique of Plato’s theory of forms where Plato gives up the theory, or a critique that causes Plato to revise his theory in The Sophist?
I answered: I doubt Plato gave up his theory, and instead he took the more difficult path of self-criticism. Something most philosophers lack the gumption to do: subject their earlier theories to severe critique and getting over the critique as well. Continue reading Plato’s Parmenides
Hayden White is renown for publishing two books that has changed the discipline of history forever: Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and The Content of the Form which boils down to the demonstration how the claim of a precise distinction between history (the narrative form which describes what happened in history) and the philosophy of history (the schema that legitimizes the narrative) is naught but a methodological blunder. Continue reading Hayden White and History
This blog is a summary of Rorty’s salient points in his essay, The Historiography of Philosophy.
There are several ways to reconstruct the writings of philosophers: the rational, the historical, and the holistic. The paradigmatic examples are, respectively; P. F. Strawson of Kant, John Dunn‘s of Locke, and Heidegger’s Question of Being. Continue reading Reconstructing philosophy
Man is an animal whose primary function is to strive for the affirmation of its life. Not only is the principle of this teleological nature biological, it is also psychological. In this context, the principle of affirmation is codified or reified as desire. Continue reading Sublimation as Discourse
In order to set the mood properly for this blog, I have decided to include several quotes by Fritz:
“What I understand by ‘philosopher:’ a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.” Continue reading The Herd and the Great Thinker
Some comments on Jean-Paul Sartre’s stance on God (or lack of). Sartre never meets the problem of God’s existence. Nowhere does he discuss the traditional arguments from religious epistemology. Interestingly, Sartre does not arrive at atheism after undergoing a philosophical expedition, in the rationalist fashion of the thinker who presumes every position he holds must be the solution to a philosophical problem. Continue reading Sartrean atheism
On a thread at the Internet Infidels about Jean-Paul Sartre, I thought it was best to explain his philosophy before attempting a criticism. Moreover, I will not assume my audience is naïve enough to require spoon feeding from the popular work, so I will start with several summaries from the actual work of philosophy, Being and Nothingness. (BN hereafter) Continue reading Analysis of Philosophy#1: Sartrean phenomenology