I just survived a 6 hour Wagner (Siegfried) marathon.

Required reading/listening/viewing: Siegfried, Act III Scene 3. The most sublime thing I've encountered all year.

(thank you matt!)

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [6:19 PM]

Happy Birthday Tae-Yeoun!!!!

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [11:35 AM]

I agree with you Matt about the supernatural being an equally valid and important category for philosophical consideration. Recently I have become impatient with deconstruction, but can't get very far with reconstruction. My friend James and I came up with this recently. Help us out.

1) to suppose that nothing exists is preposterous. You cannot argue that there is NOTHING because in the act of arguing you imply something (like mind or reason or logic at the least).

2) Let us all the opposing of NOTHING-not-existing the PREMISE OF ACTUAL EXISTENCE. I cannot thing of anything else at all that makes a better premise, since the opposite of this premise is worthless.

3) If PREMISE OF ACTUAL EXISTENCE than something is.

4) Given that something is, you can then use this something to conclude that there is knowledge in the form of this one something and therefore there is knowledge in reference to this something.

5) Let us call this something ANCHOR. From ANCHOR one creates a system capable of explaining reality. There are many systems to explain reality that are mutually exclusive but also equally defendable because they all have different Anchors.

Here is my question; is there a way to know that any given anchor (hang reality on it) is better than any other? How should we pick one then?

I am afraid however that I must strongly disagree with the notion of validity being buried in ID. It is simply an underhanded way concealing creationism within the idiom of science (my belief system). It is an insult to the careful research and thought of hundreds of thousands, there have been many rebuttals to its weaker points, but there can be no scientific discussion about its stronger points because no such points exist. ID theories about kangaroo origins, for example, do not take place in journals of mammalian biology because, for example, they would require researchers to disregard overwhelming genetic, morphological, distributional, and physical which submitted essays never attempt to discuss. e.g. It doesn't matter if a flood could have been responsible for Australia's endemic fauna (which I have never seen argued well) when for the flood to take place the atmosphere would have to hold over 800 lbs of water per cubic meter before the rains, which would suffocate mammals anyway (an atmosphere of 90% H2O and 8% N with less than 2%O ?!). Anyway, I'm sorry for being so hostile to ID. If it admitted that it was religion, I would be respectful because I really enjoy religious studies, but if it wants to masquerade as science, it will have to disprove many things which we have substantial evidence for before even attempting to prove things that we have (even mild) evidence against. If anyone EVER suggests to me that the vertebrate eye would have had to be designed, than they need to know how the retina is layered. Mammals and birds have very inefficient retinas and I am extremely tired of hearing that it is perfect (the light detecting cells aren't on the surface for example but burried, and blood vessles often cast shadows onto the surface in mammals). the human eye isn't as good as the pigeon, which isn't as good as the bullet shrimp (which is amazing). Mammals lost the ability to see UV. Not "never had" but lost, its in the DNA, we have a broken sequence that has mutated a lot. It is a worthless sequence outside of the context of losing that spike during the Cretaceous--an entire Hue, not Red Green or Blue, but an Entire COLOR! Point blank, and no one has ever explained the differences well without referencing successive periods of selection--mammals were nocturnal, vertebrates came from worms, ect. If you don't know about what is inefficient about the eye, you should not claim that it was designed, and believe me I've heard people try. I would never mis-quote the Bible to my roommate Dan, but he insists on statements about biogeography and paleomorphology that are simply wrong and it disturbs me that so many people buy this tripe.

alright. I'm done. sorry about the froathing at the mouth;)
Have a good night everyone, I'll be trying to memorize all of the bones of the axial skeleton and their important features. shoot me.

posted by Adrian   [6:29 PM]

labor quote eerily reminiscent of the summer of tasp*:

"well, a coup d'etat might happen this weekend so i couldn't let your sister go to the movies."

- phone conversation with my mother


(*there was a minor coup while i was away at tasp)

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [2:31 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRIAN!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [10:57 PM]

I think there's something to your comment Adrian. Obviously there's no need to reinvent the wheel. As far as technology goes, we still have several major 'breakthroughs' that are much anticipated: fusion, hydrogen engines and (maybe this is just me) teleporting. Environment and our reaction to it should insure that our technological wishlist will always be long, and current ingenuity shows promise of making progress on it. Philosophically or intellectually it seems to be a different matter. The intellectual 'environment' or paradigm plays a large role in determining the quality of thinking each generation does. The predominant materialist ideology of today is dogmatic, simple and not likely to stimulate much good thinking or writing among us.

For dogmatic, take for example the intelligent design controversy. I myself, for no real reason considering how little I understand the debate, think evolution operates by natural selection. There are a lot of people who don't, and I know some of them. They are not creationists or fundamentalists, they recognize merely that materialism (some wags call it scientism) may not be sufficient to explain our origins. So they think maybe god had a hand in evolution. Whatever. What's telling is the preposterous reaction of the establishment. All the Ivy league presidents 'courageously' rushed to denounce the ID advocates. There was no real engagement from any with ID's strongest arguments.

Also, our current consensus seems simplistic. Those who claim the metaphysical and supernatural have no place in the public realm forget Marx, who once said that the smallest human unit is not one but two. To exclude anything from the public square is to exclude it altogether. In ages prior to ours, cultures acknowledged a metaphysical reality, the contemplation of which lied behind much of the best art and philosophy. What about our cultural institutions? Take the NYT. The New York Times website has many categories on the left side of the page. They offer an interesting lens for how The Times, "the parish paper of secularism" views what's 'fit to print'. When categories like 'Crosswords', 'Home and Garden', 'Fashion and Style', 'Dining and Wine' and the especially redundant 'Sports' and 'Olympics' all make the cut, the exclusion of 'Religion' is especially striking. I for one would be happy to compromise for "Spirituality" if they put a space between 'Cross' and 'words' --so it would be Cross Words-- that would give it an intersting meta-journalistic element of irony.

So instead of great works, we have great un-works. The best texts of modernity seem to deconstruct. Nietzche announces God is dead. Foucault and Derrida say something or other and WHAMMO we are all post-structuralists. As acts of vandalism, these authors works are impressive, especially considering the merits of what they rejected. In previous ages, the tension between the real and the metaphysical produced some great thinking and writing, even living. Casanova began in the church and certainly we can class him as having a personality type similar to that of the megalomaniac saints. Now that there is nothing left to deconstruct, it seems that our post(fill in blank)ist paradigm has little to offer. Certain texts, like Angels in America, have reintroduced the supernatural and they benefit immensely for it. Life is more intersting when earth is framed by heaven and hell.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [8:00 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADRIAN!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [3:44 AM]

Perhaps there are fewer great thinkers in the modern era because there are fewer revolutionary thoughts left to think. You can only refocus all that there is to think a few times per social-technological revolution, and perhaps, society must become drastically different before we need different perspectives than we already have. No one is coming up with the thinks Kant or Nagarjuna came up with because they already came up with them. I'm not saying there won't be new thoughts, but that they will require more thought, time, and effort than those before them. Lets look at say Physics or Metallurgy as a parallel. In the past it was enough to learn that there was gravity or how to make copper. We already have these skills today; we can marvel at the civilizations that made copper and think "that was really something," but they will be remembered for it, even if we, given the same situation, could have done the same thing. Perhaps different schools of thought are like copper and bronze and steel; once you have them, they don't go away, and while there theoretically are more and more alloys that you could make (that is, more fine-tuning and mingling of theory) once you have the major ones, there simply are fewer breakthroughs left to make.

Idunno. Lets wait a thousand years.

posted by Adrian   [7:28 PM]

To return to my previous post, Rawls argues that ones sympathetic, liberal tendencies should lead one to encourage inequalities in our society. Obviously, not all inequalities are useful. Especially in our current political climate, this may or may not have anything to do with voting Republican. One historical example of useful inequality would be Hamilton's early monetary policies which encouraged the uneven accumulation of wealth in the country's (northern) merchant class. Such an accumulation actually spurred economic growth and efficiency since it formed an investor class that the financial wherewithal to build the factories that would propel America through the early 19th century. Basically, Bryan, I would have no qualms about tossing off the idea of equality.

However, somehow I feel you're not complaining about a lack of economic inequality. The real threat to great ambition instead seems to be the mythology of equality. Nietzche once said that all great artists were men of the right. Is there something intellectually inhibiting about the ideology of liberalism? Even the quintessential liberal, J.S. Mill was more conservative in his elitism than his lesser utilitarian precursor Bentham. Though America's intellectual A-team may not have much on the likes of Heidigger, Nietzche, Cioran, Wagner and Pound (who rightly considered himself European), I for one am glad that a group of different and lesser men share the writing credits for the Federalist.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [1:06 PM]

At the same time, I do wonder if we have a somewhat romanticized image of the academy of the past. Augustine and Nietzsche both left their jobs at their respective universities, and neither seem to look back on the experience favorably. Nietzsche in particular looks back on his professorship at Basel as a "blunder," and Augustine I remember had a great deal to say about getting cheated out of his tuition by his students. Vico, too, had to settle for an academic position he favored less - I think he wanted to be head of the Jurispudence department or something, and ended up teaching something like rhetoric. What I want to say is, the petty politics, the stringent competition, the sheer incompotence (I'm guessing) of the colleagues of these great thinkers - must always have been around.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Bryan, but I think the Tocqueville section you're referencing is the chunk around that chapter titled something along the lines of Why America Has So Many Ambitious Men but Such Small Ambitions. The redeeming(?) counterpart seems to be when he walks into the senate and finds all the Great Men there, and decides (I'm sorry, I'm butchering this shamelessly) that this is so because the senators are not elected by the people, and thus removed from this whole democracy business. This of course, is not to say that such a bubble cannot coexist with a democractic system.

In any case, Bryan, I do think we do need a bit of time to tell who and what's going to end up lasting. It seems that great ideas seem great when we can index them - that is, be able to summarize and come up with key terms and phrases sorting what it is they're saying into mental boxes of associations, and only when we are able to reduce them this way can we link them to other thinkers, locate them in the history of ideas, probe for their relevance today, etc. Just as, only now in the second half of this decade (when are the flying cars coming??!!), do we begin to find ourselves in a position to dub sometihng "so nineties," I think we're still waiting for the ideas of the early/mid 20th century to settle.

I personally think the problem has more to do with specialization: the fragmentation of knowledge into separate disciplines - particularly between the Humanities and the Sciences - makes it harder, I think, to think 'outside the box.' Where have all the Renaissance people gone? Was it a coincidence that so many of our classic philosophers - including political philosophers - were also mathematicians?

(Matt: congratulations!)

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [6:51 PM]

I would say that in our society it is the job of the universities to produce great minds. Great academics of the past include figures like Augustine, Abelard, Vico and Nietzche. Somehow, Cornel West and Harold Bloom don't seem to measure up. Probably the most important 'theorist' of late is John Rawls, the Harvard prof who graduated from Princeton in the 50's. Rawls was a good Cambridge liberal but made the point that equality was not necessarily a good. For him society should be structured according to the maximin principle, that is inequality should be tolerated so long as it maximizes the minimum --basically that the goal should be to make the poorer richer in absolute terms, instead of in relative terms. Theoretically, this could mean absolute equality, but most likely it leads to a society where wide inequalities can be tolerated and even encouraged so long as they serve a constructive purpose.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [12:45 PM]

i wonder... and i know that you guys would probably disagree... but i feel as though there has been a lack of thought in theory. that is to say, the greatest thinkers in time have been a while back... and we seem to have difficultly ever coming up something entirely profound in the past century. You might point at a myraid of different thinkers - but my response to you will simply be that we hear about adam smith or rousseau or plato or aristotle... but do you hear about modern thinkers in the same vein as they?
i don't believe that in 200 years from now, rousseau will be any less important and the modern thinkers of today any more so... i'm not a believer of the whole "in time" things will change argument.

in any case, i only bring this up because i just finished reading tocqueville, of whom one concern about the world today is the plight of equality. equality, according to him, not only brings up those at the bottom but it brings down those at the top. hence, the lack of original thought or progress...
i rejected it at first... but in thinking some more, i'm beginning to feel uneasy about threat of equality and democracy for man.

please convince me that i'm wrong.

posted by Bryan Lee   [11:06 PM]

Those who have read F. Scott's This Side of Paradise will be familiar with Princeton's eating club and bicker system. I'm happy to report a favorable outcome to my bid at the Tower Club.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [2:39 PM]

That article is amazing. Thanks for posting it-

see

"Seizing upon a fragment surrounded by quotation marks in one of Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscripts — “I have forgotten my umbrella” — Derrida observes that we cannot know Nietzsche’s intention:

Because it is structurally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning. . . . It is quite possible that that unpublished piece, precisely because it is readable as a piece of writing, should remain forever secret. But not because it withholds some secret. Its secret is rather the possibility that indeed it might have no secret, that it might only be pretending to be simulating some hidden truth within its folds.

So far so good, though Derrida does expend an exorbitant amount of verbal energy affirming the unexceptionable truth that the meaning of a century-old sentence fragment lifted from an unpublished manuscript in a foreign language can be difficult if not impossible to discern. With admirable restraint, Dickstein summarizes Derrida’s exceedingly extravagant next step:

From this exquisite miniaturization, however, Derrida leaps without warning to the largest generality: the possibility that “the totality of Nietzsche’s text, in some monstrous way, might well be of the type ‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’” since this illusory “totality,” this whole body of work, is itself no more than a larger trace or remnant of what may also be irrecoverable. And the same may be true of Derrida’s own “cryptic and parodic” text, which, he suggests, may be no more than a joke, a parody of his own ideas, and so on. "

posted by Adrian   [12:57 AM]

interesting and vaguely relevant article.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [12:34 PM]

instant messenger speak in my poetry workshop:

prof: i think you're third line may be a little o.t.t.

student: haha lol

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [3:19 PM]

We haven't done labor quotes in a while. Let's do labor quotes again.

"The 'Wal' in 'Walkürie' is an antiquated German word that means 'the corpses left on the field of battle.'"

"In the first production at Bayreuth they brought in an actual horse, but I've never seen it done before. Usually the singer who plays Brünhilde looks like a horse anyway."

- Wagner class

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [3:14 PM]

This picture makes me so happy:



Bostoners- you'll be missed.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [7:26 PM]

It was strange to see TASPers again in the city of Austin. The Drag seems to be dying out. The Barnes and Noble is gone, so is the Tower Records and some of the local businesses have also closed. However Einstein's Arcade of DDR fame, Little City, Metro, Toy Joy and the glut of vintage stores are all still standing. Kelsey and Tara wore cool hipster outfits and really nifty, colorful cowboy boots. Aside from the shorter hair, they both looked exactly the same as at TASP. The two of them used the word 'gestalt' more times in five minutes than I expect I ever will. They have a cat that liked me much less than I liked her and Tara has a boyfriend who speaks very quickly and well--a great guy. Unfortunately, I didn't meet Kelsey's man. I learned that humble Tara won Texas' most prestigious leadership award for her intense involvement in various groups like Oxfam, beating out about 15,999 other students in her class.
The three of us ate at Kelsey and Tara's house with Dr. Chappelle and Dr. Randall and another girl who lives in the house. After learning that this third girl had met Alex Yablon I was unsurprised to hear that she wanted to get in his pants. Good luck on that, babe. Dr. Chapelle is trying to stage a play she completed last year and is doing research aimed at showing that the renaissance was a collectivist and not an individualist moment. Dr. Randall is still teaching engineers but has started working on a group writing project with her former classmates at the Kent prep school. In Texas, the individual seems to have gone the way of the aquatic ape. She talked about one of her teachers that was inhumanly cruel, and of course she was from Oklahoma. That state is central to every theodicy ever originated in Texas.

We mainly sat there and gossipped about all of you TASPers. It was a grand time and I was a little tempted by Dr. Randall's suggestion that I transfer. Not too tempted though.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [11:59 AM]

[ website ] :: [ contact ] :: [ home ]

XML