Donnie Darko

"If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you have touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else." -Dr.Lilian Thurman

Back East

"In my view, the intellect is not an efficient weapon to deal with this question of ultimate reality. True, it raises the question, but this does not mean that it is qualified to answer it. The asking of the question in fact demonstrates the urge to find something ultimate on which we can earnestly stake our human destiny."

"Underlying our intellection, there is faith. When the intellect gives shape to itself, it cherishes a doubt as to the presence of faith, and this makes the intellect wander further and further away from its roots. In fact, all intellectual efforts we make to solve the problem of reality are really directed towards the restoration of faith from which the problem started. The trouble with the intellect is that it does not realize what it is working for. Imagining that it has its own end, it goes on posing question after question. Or one might describe the process in another way: faith, negating itself, is turned into doubt, and doubt, which is at the bottom of curiosity and questioning, starts up intellection. When intellection comes to an impasse to which it will surely come one day if it works honestly it sees itself reflected in the mirror of faith, which is its homecoming. The intellect thus finally arrives at the great affirmation."

SUZUKI TEITARO DAISETZ
The Buddhist Conception of Reality

Kierkegaard - Either/Or

For me nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. As soon as I have recollected a life relationship, that relationship has ceased to exist. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is very true, but it becomes fonder in a purely poetic way. To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has a security that no actuality possesses. A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore. 

P.32 Either/Or

Derrida notes from a lecture series X

Jan 11, 2013

This guy is a very hard nut to crack if read in a vacuum, but easier in historo-philosophical context. Just like everybody else.

1

Deconstruction
-anti platonic. an attack on ultimates or the idea that ultimates have anything to do with anything that is human

- involves not getting at an essence, but unsettling or desedimentizing in order to make room for something new - called an event

- to deconstruct is not just to destroy but to give something its future. To de-solidify an encrustation so to speak

- D states deconstruction is "the affirmation of the possibility of impossibility"

- in a nutshell deconstruction involves the view that any word can be quotable in scare marks ("x"). Words at the root have metaphorical beginnings. As opposed to the view that words are related by correspondence to an absolute referent. Words are continually "haunted by the future and the past"

Logocentrism (writing-centric)

- deprivileged in the west (except math)

- the alphabet

- mathematics

Phonocentric (speaking-centric)

- privileged in the west

- speech

The future involves hostility

- future means to prepare for a danger, though the true future is something that cannot be prepared for.

The end of the "book"

- the book is transparent ideas put in a structured way with a beginning, middle, and end

- the end of the book brings in the beginning of writing

- the end of words as mere signifiers of being

- the move from structuralist linguistics to  

2

Words (written and spoken) and there relation to the lived world have been a MAJOR topic in analytically bent philosophy. D has a refreshing take on this battle front. He wants to detach from the notion that words must ultimately mach up with a "reality" outside. The kind of belief a strict dictionary writer would hold dear.

The west has been caught up in a rut as of late.

This idea that there is a chain of abstractedness from the ultimate. For example, that alphabetic writing being the most abstracted and therefore being characterized as otherness or outsideness from a truer insidedness. The Greeks criticized writing as dead, lifeless, prone to make people lazy to committing knowledge to memory. The spoken word was truer to the "source" speech acts were fuller with life. This comes down to our times as well.

The "source" abstracted:

Being > things > thought (of some-thing) > speech (talking, phonetics) > writing 

-Derrida wants to criticize this speech-centrism or this idea that speech is somehow closer to being. More so, he wants to deconstruct the idea of the relation, near or far, from any true "way." 
-If there is no grand programmer (to use a modern term for God), creator, or first thought then there is no program or what the Greeks called Logos. If the idea of Logos is unsound then to where are we to find this correspondence to how-it-is-supposed-to-be? He calls this adherence logo-centrism. Logos is the thought, the concept behind things. He wishes to deconstruct this notion of a presence "ultimate behind things." This is the idea of truth characterized as presence or the truer a thing is the more present it is to the ultimate "source"

Derrida's is not saying that words have no referent (a concept), but that they refer through differance. Like in a dictionary, words refer to other words for meanings, not to an ultimate definition in itself. There is no ultimate link to a words "source." A words meaning is always in relation to its not meaning what another word means. Or, the total abstraction of a word from its "world" or context would be meaningless.

Writing cannot be heard like speech, hence Derrida's use of the spelling of difference with an "a" (differ[a]nce). This difference is only seen in text not speech.

Derrida is appreciative of Heidegger's attack on traditional Greek platonic metaphysics, he opened it up, yet ultimately includes H in the logocentric tradition. A tradition that he wants to criticize and deconstruct.

Is language programmable  Can we make a computer program that truly emulates language? If yes you may be a structuralist. If no you may be a Derridindian or post-structuralist, were there is no ultimate rule that guides grammar but it fluxes and flows laterally like the internet has come about, with no central plan or program (logos).

37:00

The language of signifier and signified must be deconstructed. Differance and the notion of the trace will replace it.

The precursors to deconstruction were Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel:

There is a heideggerian interpretation of  Nietzsche in 1965  that he was the last metaphysician of the will, that he simply flipped plato's metaphysics on its head. (plato what is is unchanging eternal/ Nietzsche everything is change) Deluze (1962 book on N talks about deferential forces rather than dialectical) and Derrida interpreted him differently. The alternate N is the philosopher of differences. The will to power is a play of "micro forces in difference" a "multiplicity of willing forces" there is no one metaphysical big will.

Derrida's truth is a multiplicity of small truths, no big totalizing truth in itself. N says Truth is the effect of the play of forces.

Derridinian truth is characterized more like muliplicities of frames and discourse regimes

Heidegarian moods as atunments or as callings criticized by Derrida as metaphorical and phono-centric.

H tries to escape being as presents by writing being under eraser (by crossing the word out when written). Being is constituted. No more Being and beings, but something more primordial ... difference. This is later H.

1:22:0

Signifiers are arbitrary. There are many signifiers for a tree. You can point at a tree and call it anything at all. The significance of a signifier then is its difference from other signifiers. A space in-between two signifiers is the condition of possibility of a difference which makes the two stand out. 

No longer a Platonic binary opposition that is looked at, but the space that creates the binary that is important. 

In structuralism langue is the deep structure or grammar of language. Infinite sentences can be made from a finite set of grammatical rules. The subject is no longer seen as generating their own language, but the language system generates a single "event" or parole. A parole is what structuralist call an instance of langue .

- the langue (not arbitrary) is the structure the non-arbitrary signified that the signifier (arbitrary) points to.

- Derrida breaks with this non-arbitrary structure of the signified, the langue. Both the signified AND the signifier are arbitrary!

- Attacks the deep structure. "the play of differences between signifiers cannot be contained by a structure, a set of rules. So it follows that if there is no deep underlying structure of language then language cannot be programmed because there is no one totalizing rule to program!

Structurally, speaking and writing are not different.

Seusure (father of structuralism) and the Copenhagen school both argued for the importance of difference but held on to the a notion of the primacy of speech (Seusere) or of deep grammatical structure (Copenhagen). Derrida became the first to talk of "pure" difference. There is no center, no ground, but difference.

Metaphors are new context for words. Old metaphors solidify and become literal. There is no genius from the outside introducing pure newness  just a tinkerer skillfully throwing a monkey wrench into the system. Any word has its beginning in some lost metaphor even if it seems quite literal.

Written language is not language proper. For example German spoken now is a conglomeration of dialects that Martin Luther put together for the German translation of the bible. The learned German classes spoke this increasingly till it became the "official" German  Squeezing other variations to the margins.

to be continued ...

Sean Kelly phil 292

Views of the current age:

Kierkegaard's leveling - that meanings have been leveled out. A leveling of meaningful distinctions of worth. A clock strikes the hour every hour, but for what? In contrast to middle ages Dante, were everything has its level of meaning. The clock bell meant something then.

Nietzsche's The Gay Science section 125 God is Dead. And we have all killed him. That is,  God no longer has a role in organizing our daily meanings and practices. 

Charles Tyler's book Secular Age

He argues that now is the first truly secular age.

No more certainty about belief because nonbelievers can live a good life too, so there is an added pressure on the believer to argue against nonbelievers.

So God has no more social authority... where do we draw meaning from?

Nietzsche likes this situation, nihilism. We get to chose our values, a freedom. Sartre similar to Nietzsche in that we have a total freedom in what we are - a total responsibility in ourselves. No appeal to God, Kant's categorical imperative, or even utilitarian justifications - can only appeal to ones self. Is this freedom and groundlessness good news?

David Foster Wallace and T.S Elliot- two paradigm cases of Nietzscheans who preached absolute self sufficiency - taking everything as their responsibility

This world of leveling and the death of God presents a meaning crisis where nothing means anything more than the other so why act, why chose? Frozen in inaction, frozen in an infinity of possibility, lives filled with endless series of indecision. 

We have this unique problem in the west what are we to do? We must look at history and great works of art and re-appropriate ways of being of the past, but not romanticize the past.

Fight:

Hegel's history - progressive can be an "end of history" a culmination. From slavery to liberal democracy. Cross cultural universal truths that can be reached.

v.s.

Heidegger's - No rational cross cultural progress. Works of art that organize peoples lives. Lives in one age not commensurable with others, true rebirth of ways of living. No absolute way of being, but adaptive.

So we read these works as highlights of ways of being in a certain epoch and see if these ways of being can be re-appropriated into our own to solve problems in our epoch.

2

Contemporary  nihilism 

An anti nihilist ---

Heidegger's essay the question concerning technology that:

-Aristotle had a better since of cause and effect than we do today.

-to live in a technological age as we do does not only mean the existence of tech devices but a mode of revealing (disclosing). 

-we in our practices enframe that is we look at things as resources to organize or use as a resource. E.g. an airplane has how many seats, passengers as hunan resources to fill it instead of individuals. We even view ourselves as resources, we have our calendar to optimize our work. This is dangerous. It shuts us out from dealing with the demands of a situation from without. 

vs.

A nihilist----

David Foster Wallace's self redemption through an intense inter dialogue method (thinking-all-the-time--ism)

Foster Wallace - looking for a saving grace in every moment by an intensely self-conscious force of will. Trying to find a spiritual transcendence at every moment. Opposed by Homer were the hero sticks out tuff times and lets the inspiration come to them. David F had a Descartes view of human flavor. That's to say such a strategy makes it very hard  to connect with things outside ones mental sanctuary.

Heidegger -  wants to resist the idea that we are at our best as totally self contained selves against objects. Against Descartes self in pure thought. We should be more trusting and open to things outside our inter mental sanctuary. 

-against the view that we project meaning on a meaningless world, we are receptive to meanings already in the world - the receptivity view of the world, Homer agrees

-Helen is praised in Homer for being a receptive being by running away with Paris, listening to Aphrodite. Helen is a paragon of womanhood.

Homer's Odyssey is an exemplification of a way of being respectful of outside influences, the suiters represent the "bad guys" since they act as though all actions are born from themselves with no outside influences and they act as autonomous agents wrecking everything. Maybe the way of the suitor in Homer is what Wallace is aiming for.

Kant the originator of us as a self law giving self. This cuts us off from the world already with its own meanings and this leads to a kind of nihilism.

So we have Wallace's controlling our inter mental states in order to deal with the current state of meaninglessness, while Heidegger contrast this with an appeal to forces from without to save us from meaninglessness. 

3

Heidegger - we are currently in the epoch of enfraiming were everything  is looked at as a commodity or resource to be optimized. 

-the danger in this is it keeps us from being receptive to meanings outside ourselves. 

Wallace - we are in an age of distractions that prevent our taking control of our lives

-saved from this by controlling how and what we think about situations, to project our own meaning / Heidegger exactly opposed

[Student makes a good point] that H tackles the technological aspect of closing our receptivity W takes on the informational aspect, that our quest for more and more information closes us off from being open to more satisfying meanings

Kantian essential human is the constantly conceptualizing and categorizing being - active thinking beings - self law and meaning givers actively following an imperative or meaning at every moment - autonomous agents of the enlightenment

- H's essential human being is receptive (not to be confused with passive).

Example of responding to a meaningful authority of a situation outside oneself:

-The grand master chess player through hours of practice learns to see the chessboard differently. Moves that need to be made are already on the board without the need for much thought. One cannot really control what they see in a necker cube depiction, its been proven that it isn't up to us. We have no real way of controlling how predefined gestalts shape out perceptual world, so the practiced chess players gestalt concerning the chessboard shapes meaning he experiences, he cannot will this purely on his own. An outside authority he must conform to in-order to win. The practice is not entirely conceptual but a way of conforming to situations outside oneself. 

-Training is a way to change ones gestalt to bring out new skills and therefore new meanings in the world, not a learning of new concepts and intellectual distinctions.

Hegel on Homer - that human being was partially developed in homeric times. On a scale from non-free to free agents or the human spirit (history on the level of groups or states) developing itself (realizing itself) the greeks made a partial improvement from nature. World historical individuals whose individual needs are in perfect sync with the age they are in move history forward by shear force of will.

Heidegger - no progression of history in a neseccery chain of epochs to a final goal.

-no world historical figures who actively force through will a new epoch of history.

-h's lecture "the principal of reason" 1955-56 pg.191 the geschik of being or how being changes across epochs..."being cleared and lit itself as if it had a character of shining forth..." ..."the epochs suddenly spring up like sprouts" very different from Hegel's rational development of epochs. 

The project ti re-appropriate saving practices from past epochs is useless in a Hegelian view of history, because the past is seen as something that is incomplete and useless. Only if we have a view of history as a series of gestalt shifts and stat clear of value judgments about their stage in some culmination can we start the project.

4

Is there a way to base our existence on a non-ratiinal basis since a rational bases ends in the answer there is no rational reason to continue existence?

The modern person is seen as an self contained autonomous rational agent. This type is not seen much in Homer's Odyssey. Can we learn something from this epoch of history and bring it into our own?

Bernerds Homer:

We find in Homer a kind of being outside the Kantian moral imperative and utilitarian debate, one that makes a blind leap that gets its meaning retroactively - for they do not know the consequences nor deliberate on a moral maxim about a situation. 

Homer's phenomenology of the gods was one of attunement. No internal moods but the god represents an attuner. The mood of a party is a public one, one were it can catch you up or not at all, it is not up to you, the public mood proceeds you. You must get attuned. 

There are people who can attune themselves to a situation according to what that situation demands at that moment and not according to a general rule deliberated upon in lonely isolation.

5 Homer

Homer reifies or ontologieses the phenomenal experience of acting according to what a particular situation demands of one as a visitation from a god, yet we can still treat this experience  seriously without reifying the outside authority as a god.

Bernerd Williams book Shame and Necessity is similar to the All Things Shining (ATS) project.

-same in that he rejects Hegel's progressive view of history

-telimicus leaving the door open of the store house was an unintentional act that he took responsibility for - responsibility without intentional action

-intentional act without responsibility--Agamemnon takes Persais away from Achilles in The Iliad thus leaving Achilles in depression. Agamemnon explains that the gods produced a kind of blindness when he did it. Bernerd takes this as an account of someone in a state unlike their usual selves and this type of act not blameworthy. 

-Kelley disagrees that this blindness from the gods is the same in all cases from Homeric writers. Helen of troy's case is different than Agamemnon's or Oedipus's case in that she drawn to do something that allowed her to do and be what was best in her situation. 

-to be open to the gods is good in that it allows the human being to be their best, but the consequences may not always be good for everybody. It is risky.

-we can in our time make a distinction as to if we want to follow through in a action that may allow us to be our best yet have adverse effects.

-Agamemnon was blinded and then acted on his own where Helen was blinded and then led by Aphrodite. 

-like sleep one cannot force it or plane it but can only open oneself or relinquish oneself, then sleep my come.

The role of "gods" in Melvil's Moby Dick and In Homer are similar and we want to recover but everything in between (jesus, The Orestia, Dante's Inferno) is too rational leaning. 

7 Aeschylus (A)

The Orestia

-A represents a midpoint in the phenomenological role of the gods in greece between Homer and Aristotle where Zeus replaced by the prime mover.

-his understanding of the gods radically different than Homer. 

-A is writing during the axial age (800 to 200 B.C.), which was a large world shift from polytheism to monotheism. A shift from the outside source of meaning of different incommensurable types into a single transcendent source. 

-Phusis by Parmenides and Heraclitus was the view that nature or  whatever that there is has the whooshing up and fading away aspect to it. In the monotheistic standpoint the whooshing up from is named and unifies what things are whooshing up from.

-A's gods tend to be more monotheistic. Two main forces or type of gods, the old gods (the furies) and the new gods (the olympian gods)

-a tension between to incommensurable ways of acting. A choice between two. Deliberation and choice becomes more important. Unified in the end by Athena via patriotism.

-no need to unify incommensurate values in Homer and Melvil.

The old gods - the furies:

-Revenge

-Family and blood ties

-the night, darkness

-earth

The new gods - the olympians (Apollo et al.):

-Reason

-day, light

-sky

Arrestees in his decision to kill his mother is forced between doing because she killed the king (on the side of reason - Apollo) or because she killed his father (on the side of revenge - the furies).

-this is a tragedy not about psychological flaws in its characters, but characters trapped in between two opposing cultural forces 

-Helen is blamed and looked at as promiscuous for running away with Paris in Aeschylus not praised as she was in Homer.

-Zeus protects the host rather than the strangers. Its the revers in Homer. 

8 Orestia cont.

-This is a tragedy of greek culture at the time composed of two competing True ways of being, that of loyalty tones family or loyalty to universal justice. not of individual tragedy based on flawed physiology. Set up lose by choosing ether one.

-Agamemnon is forced to chose between killing his daughter and doing what is universally right as a king and his people or not to kill and do what is right as a father. This is a result of the culture presenting this dilemma. 

-Arrestees is convincing himself to kill his mother not according to the old gods (vengeance for his father) but for the new (killing is universally wrong - reasoned justice). To do this requires an argument, uses gis dream as an argument to kill his mother with correct reason. However, convincing oneself through an argument is hardly going to get you to kill your mother. Ad Hume said "reason is slave to the passions." Arrestees friend Paladies, takes him out of himself and gives objective social sanction to what he is to do. Paladies says that is better to have man hate you than the new gods (universal justice).

-Athena sets up the first jury system in Greece that is a reconciling between particular (familial) and universal (state) justice.

-the old gods will sit in golden chairs on the earth and not be cast out (suppressed) but invited at the table with the new.

9

Heiddegger's The Origin of the Work of Art

-3 types of works of art originating, reconfiguring, and articulating

-art works show things as an equipment not as they are as substances or manifolds of qualities (as what they are if we stand back and look at it). As a thing is used makes up what a thing is. The master carpenter knows more about what a hammer is than the scientist. So a true work of art show the equipmantality of things.

-a work of art holds up and makes explicit a cultures background practices.

-works of art can bring in an entire new way of being. A new way of anythings being as what it is or means is brought forth.

-three works of art in the west have played this role Jesus being the reconfigurer of antiquity into middle ages. an originator of agope love.

-a reconfiguring work of art may be unintelligible at first because of its radical change with the past, so it needs articulation. E.g., jesus speaks in parables and is obscure, he is later articulated by disciples and church fathers.

10

-A reconfiguring work of art (such as Jesus) contains a tripartite ontological structure that allows it to reconfigure the worlds meanings.

1) needs a world before. A world of background practices so background as to be obvious and not obvious

2) a being that manifest a whole new understanding of being. One who sees current background practices and can build on them. They will look crazy because radical in their potential to shift the background

3) articulators, people who are interested enough to articulate through known background practices the new crazy sounding practices. 

-The trinity is an example of this tripartite structure of an reconfiguring work of art.

1) the hebrew God - the old background practices - jewish law

2)Jesus - the son - the new world reconfiguring mood - agape love - internal sin as opposed to breaking public law. Intentions against outward deeds.

3) the holy spirit - the articulators of Jesus touched by Jesus's agape love - the  latter writers of the bible and church fathers

Heidegger's distinction of earth and world. The work of art preserves the context of a struggle between earth and world.

Earth-- "whatever it is that rises up as self closing"

-a being who manifest something that you need to get clear about, but the more you get clear about it the more it closes itself off.

World-- articulators?

Late Heidegger, Eastern thought not unified like the west on being, have many terms for "is" 

More polytheist than west on being so closer to Homeric.

Logos 

1) Greeks - the word or the ones with words - humans

2) Latin's - rational or animal with rationality

- Heidegger against this assumption of what we are as with words or rational but logos as was truly used by Heraclitus meant the being who discloses a meaningful world on the bases of which we could find words meaningful - condition of the possibility of meanings

Gospel of John "he was in the world and the world cane into being through him the world did not know him"

11

The greek platonic rational universal ahistorical way is melded with the particular and personal relationship with God way of the hebrews in middle ages. This mix had problems, Aquinas tries to aristotilienize Christianity away from the platonic to address this.

Christ as platonic heaven, unrelatible to humans vs. christ as hebrew earthy savior who normal humans can relate to.

Enter Dante's Inferno, a work of Aristotelian christianity.

This world of the high middle ages everything that has any meaning is in virtue of its association with god. A higherarchy of being based in levels of godliness. 

This is not a plurality of worlds like in Homer or competing worlds as in Aeschylus there is only one good only one way of being.

There is no longer a possibility of tragedy,  god is behind everything, everybody gets what they deserve.

Virgil is Dante's first guide but cannot follow him into heaven because Virgil was of the time before Jesus, a stoic so he is stuck in a passionless limbo state. The great greek philosophers also are in this state. 

the city walls of Dis keep God out, not sinful soles in. A city of soles rebellious of Gods love and the world of being dictated by gradations of god.

Gods love draws everything towards him, he is the prime mover. The human will be fulfilled as long as he does not resist this natural pull of Gods love. A sinner closes himself off from this natural human attraction.

!!!!!! This force from outside is similar to Homer or Heidegger's being open to outside influence but differs in that there is only one true way of doing it while in Homer there are many ways !!!!!!

Dante circles of hell can represent the many ways we can get in the way of opening ourselves to an outside authority. Three big distinctions: 

1) the virtuous pagans in limbo who lack any knowledge of Gods love

2) people who love the wrong thing who's authority is not Gods love or influence i.e. love of food, sex, power.

3) those inside the city if Dis, ones who wholly and knowing reject outside authority or Gods loving force. Rejecting the view of humans as being open and receptive beings to outside authority and affirming humans as active automatons or agents totally producing a self-reflexive world of meaning, later actualized through Descartes, Kant, N, and nihilism.

The very center of hell is satan flapping his wings cooling hell. Frozen from the lack of gods love no movement cold. Satan the supreme representative of an autonomous being a total rebelling of any outside source of inspiration. This over rationality freezes him indecision.

A work representing a kind of monotheistic nihilism in that nothing means anything but ones relation to God.

Beatrice leads Dante to heaven. She rips herself from a state of pure contemplation of God to do this. Dante is to learn that this direct relation to God trumps even his love for Beatrice.

12 Melville's Moby Dick

The subject as cut off from all outside influences is made common in western culture by Descartes. Satan's rebellion against Gods love is represented in all human beings and is now is a state of total doubt as to any outside influence at all. The subject becomes in a world of private sensations the only source of authority. Autonomous subjects or as Kant latter dubs self moral law givers.

This work speaks to nihilism both theological and Nieziean and presents multiple sources of authority outside oneself.   

Ahab - The representative of the monotheistic nihilist - fanatical in his belief. The whale somehow holds the secret to his meaning in life and behind its face an universal meaning of life.

Ishmael - The one who is open to multiple outside authorities represented in moods. He can take on the moods of many people throughout the story.

Moods since Descartes and Kant are seen as psychological and internal in the subject and a neutral mood of stilted reason is most prized. We want to over turn this conception of a mood. Moods are from without and not internally produceable. Our moods color are whole outlook through and through, we must open ourselves to these public moods, not close off in disassociated aloof cutoffedness. 

The story begins with Ishmael in a nihilistic mood " stormy November drizzle" the only answer to this is to go to sea. To travel to new worlds similar to Odeusus in the Odyssey. 

13 

The whale represents the background practices in that they make up what we do and are - ever present. but we can never really grasp what they may all be , never write then down in a book say. The whale is white. White is a "dumb blankness full of meaning." White represents all colors and in this case all ways of being and all possible moods. One cannot see its face not because it has no face. Ahab in his zealous religious nihilism believes he can see its face and drives him and his crew to certain death in his effort.

If we are to escape from nihilism we must resurrect the Gods of old. Not the christian god nor gods as real entities but resurrect a since of multiple paths of human excellence instead of just one as with monotheism or self created paths as with nihilism. 

A return of the mayday gods of old

A panoply of multiple and incommensurate ways of life

The new poly ways of being different from Homers in that Zeus being the gateway to other ways (he was the leader of a family of like gods, the strangers go-between) is replaced by the white whale, the faceless indeterminable whiteness giving no real analog to other modes of existence. 

The meta poetic skill:

Not all ways to meaning are the correct ways. There can be bad ways as in getting caught up in Hitlers mood of a master race. Good in getting swept up in Martine Luther Kings mood of equality.

To not get caught up at all because of the fear of the loss of ones autonomy (which is what will happen) would be to perhaps live the life of leveled meaning or never allow cultural change. We need to cultivate a skill in being able to determine right moods from wrong. A skill not a reason.

Herbert Dreyfus

"Notes" to Dreyfus philosophy 6 course.

With the existentialist point of view we cannot hold on to notions of a human essence. We live in ages where our culture, born from myths of a certain time, guid what it means to be human. Through the investigation of great works of art from past cultures (ways of being, or being-in-the-world) we can gleam different ways of being a human being from that world. Dreyfus works his way through significant works of western art to illustrate the different ways of being human, and how the west's way of being has tried to grapple with contradictory moral systems represented, say, with the proud greek hero opposed to the Christian self-abasing saint.

Another common theme runs trough this and other Dreyfus courses, that of a kind of anti-cognitiveism. This is the idea that the mind, rationally choosing and acting is important, but not a central aspect of our lives (nor a phenomenologically accurate portrayal either). Throughout this course Dreyfus traces ways of being that did not involve such heavy emphasis on the rational aspect of our lives, and how more balanced whys of being have existed in the past and therefore should be held as examples.

In Heidegger, moods played an important role as do they for Dreyfus. Moods dictate the party, not individuals. If we are to escape will-based or internalistic view points regarding consciousness in a realistic way, we considering moods, which at first seem important only to an individual, but upon investigation reveal a way of describing something that moves us apart from atomistic self-conscious acts. We are at the mercy of our moods, they color what is meaningful to us. And in that analysis we have a central Drey-degger theme. In looking at the greek culture, Dreyfus contends that the greek gods did not represent actual gods to the greeks but represented various moods. The gods represent to us internal dialogs we would have with ourselves, yet to the greeks an internal dialog with oneself is foreign in their culture or way of being-in-the-world. The Furies in the Oresteia represent vengeance, so it is to be interpreted by our reading that vengeance is in the air whenever they appear. The main point of the course is that who or what to blame in human matters has changed throughout written history. Helen of Troy is praised, not ridiculed by her running off with Paris, thus starting the Trojan war. In Homeric times, Helen in doing this followed the call of Aphrodite (the mood or god of love), a sign of a person favored by the gods, or in Dreyfus's language, a person attuned to the prevailing mood, and thus doing what was called for for the particular situation, not as a result of labored analysis and deliberation.


Heidegger's Types of art working:

Originating
Articulating


The Odyssey
-Originating work of art
-Nothing new but focusing certain aspects of the culture
 
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
-Articulating work of art 
-the Greeks have separated reason from emotion, Apollo from the Furies, leaving little room for gods as attuners
-An ontological tragedy as opposed to a phycological
-The culture of reason and emotion united in patriotism for Athens by Athena

Gospel of John

The trinity:
1) God the Father compared to Heideggerian background practices
2) The Son (Jesus) is to the exemplar the supreme example - the reconfigurer of a new age of human meaning - uses new language, so not directly understandable e.g. Jesus spoke in parables
3) The Holy Spirit represents the articulators who articulate the new language in common language - the Apostles, Paul

Jesus - the work of art working (or the dawn of private sin)
Lecture14
Jesus - you break the law even if you desire another woman. Opposed to the jewish public law system where to break the law is something public, could never be a private matter.
Jesus bases his reconfiguration of Jewish law in the 10th commandment - will not covet my neighbors stuff. The term COVET refers to something internal, not publicly discernible.
Paul points this out. Cannot control coveting, so everybody is guilty of breaking the law. Paul 13 corinthians. Major paradigm shift from jewish to Christian. Paul articulated jesus the reconfigurer
Move from following the law at all cost to following the spirit of the law. 
Paul dead because of law that says his desires are to be repressed, who can suppress desire? Must get out of that. Must present a new mood, agape love. Reborn through agape love than transforms you from one guilty from ones desires.

Dante inferno: attempt at merging the greek tradition with Judeo-Christian traditions - fail 

Not many understood Paul. Augustine platinize Christianity by ignoring the body and raising the abstract. Aquinas applies Aristotle's conception of body to Christianity. Dante after Aquinas illustrates Aristotelianism. 

Virgil the stoic philosopher.

Virgil explains inferno as Aristotle like gradations of bad, but Dante knows better

At the entrance to dis or hades Virgil thinks its a prison, but Dreyfus thinks its a fortress to keep people out. The people inside the wall have set their lives for themselves , not the preset plan set by God.

Aristotle and St. Tomas Aquinas - two types of sin carnal and spiritual.  Inferno divided up by carnal sin outside wall, spiritual or will against God and his plan inside.

 The more in sin the further from God the one that animates, so the inferno is like ice at the core. People cant move. Satan is frozen. The flapping of his wings freezes hell and the absolute center of hell is his asshole, the most un celestial kind of matter. Similar to Aristotle's gradations from Earth to heavens.

Virgil the stoic does not get spiritual sin or going against Gods plan, so not let in the fortress. Stoic uses will power to not pursue pleasers too much since the world is ultimately unfulfilling. Stoic life is diametrically opposed to a christian total devotion, romantic love is alien. Beatrice takes the place of Jesus for Dante. Beatrice gets rid of the will to resist, to love hierarchically is to open yourself to the predetermined glory of God.

Martian Luther fed up with Aristotle being injected into christianity, calls for the elimination of Aristotelianism.

Dante monotheist no room for other works.

Melvil's Moby Dick- 

Understands the greek and christian mess, wants to get back to homeric acceptance of different worlds.

The dichotomy of the sea and land. Land is safe and stable slow deliberate planing in ones life. Sea is chaotic and ever-changing an has no bottom no way of rational planing

Two ways of dealing with a groundless world..science or existentialist.
Balkington represents a kind of Nietzscheian overman, yet differs in that the free spirit style of life is unlivable. Maple the preacher represented a Kierkegaard, but is also rejected. Melvil wants the return of homeric polytheism.

Whiteness represents the unified theories, meanings and perspectives in that they would cancel each other out. So in his polytheism one should not strive to unify all the different colors or meanings but let your self be attuned to this or that  color or mood. Live the rainbow not the blank nihilism of white light.

Melvil - a polytheism where the Gods are real... Non nihilistic 
Nietzsche - a polytheism where we create the Gods ...nihilism

Alain Badiou - YouTube Lectures 2010 (current)

Philosophy's goal is subjective transformation, not new knowledge. Is dialectical in nature not rational progress toward better knowledge.

The conservative philosophical approach is one that frames philosophy as the acquisition of collectively better and better knowledge i.e. analytic or scientifically bent philosophies. They attempt at the closure of philosophy, Philosophy can answer the question.


More radical philosophies do not seek ultimate closer, but engage in dialog, a dialectic. They work off the notion that we are a dialectic between being and non-being. Even conservative closure seeking philosophies have to employ dialectics to do their "closing." So they are contained in the larger set of dialectical philosophies and therefore derivative of philosophy proper, dialectical philosophy.

The grand battle:

Analytic or conservative - gaining closure by reviving the past or remaining in the present
 vs
Dialectical - ongoing conversation of ever-churning interpretations of the past/present

5 conditions for a philosophical society:

1). The philosophers philosophy must be open for discussion, non dogmatic. Democratic.

2). Common rules of discussion or rationality.

3). The possibility of universality of philosophy. Its for everybody even other societies. Plato's slave could do philosophy.

4) ?

5) philosophies are bound to their creator and their transmission is not entirely rational. A philosophy needs to engender a new subjective desire, so the originators presence is very important.

Universality is the ability to be understood from another time or part of wold history. Not reducible to its historical context. Truth exist as human creations that escape their cultural contexts.

03/01/12

Philosophy comes from a negative state of radical negativity in doubt - a nihilism.

Only through a positive affirmation can this be overcome. 

6

Mysticism (eastern "philosophy"):

"philosophy without the work, immediate"

A kind of nihilism closed in on itself

"Radical solitude with God"

Pure experience in the infinite

Pure subjectivity

In-immediate Philosophy (western) deals with the describable, non-mystic

Creative Repetition:

Creation of the new from a repetition.

A repetition of a method to new objects

A repetition of 1+n results in a new number. A dialectic of identity and difference. (has something to do with Hegel).

Then an interruption in creative repetition. An event. A beginning before creative repetition. Something between the question of existence and to be.

7

The distinction between pure being and existence (appearances). What IS truth vs. the MEANING of truth. 

Two points of view of truth, from being or from existence. e.g. Hegel's two books,1st The Logic - is from being, and the 2nd, The Phenomenology - from existence. Or Plato's Parmenides from being-as-such, and The Apology from existence.

The "great" philosophers deal in both view points. English positivist dealt with only appearances or existence.

A philosophy begins from the nihilistic state in subjectivity presented with a choice between being or existence. There are differing reactions to the nihilistic state, from exstream frightfulness to resignation. The frightful want immediate escape and chose dogmatic being based philosophies. Descartes in his meditations is in this state of doubts then chooses being. Were Nietzsche or K may dwell more in the nihilistic state of subjectivity.

In science the scientist disappears in their works, not possible in philosophy because of nihilistic subjective beginnings.

-his two books conform to this dual view of truth.

Truth in first (Being and Event) was an answer to truth as proposition. Truth as otherworldly, that is truth existing non-concretely - un-touchable (with our normal senses).

Second (Logic of the World) Truth as a work of art not a confirmation or denial of a question. If truth exist then it must be concrete not other worldly.

Modern philosophy has been a criticism of the truth characterized as an equation to solve for.