David Harvey On Crisis (and more from Marxism 2009)

Some videos from Marxism 2009:

And some more stuff on the crisis with Chris Harman, Alex Callinicos, and Slavoj Žižek.

Reading Honneth’s Pathologies of Reason

Long Sunday (long out of action but now back) is doing a reading of Axel Honneth’s new book Pathologies of Reason. The first post (of many, I assume) is up here.

Braver Reading Group: Chapter 4 – Nietzsche’s Will To Truth

[If you're just joining us, please click on the cover icon on the right side of the page to see the post that gathers all the discussions of Braver Reading Group, or click here]

A Thing of This World’s fourth chapter is dedicated to Nietzsche, a rather interesting choice, as Braver states from the very beginning of the chapter.  Nietzsche’s big beef with realism is its psychological motivations “that cause people to find certain views persuasive” – if realism is a disease, so to speak, then what is the cure (if there’s one) or, more interestingly, what is the motivation behind the philosophical view of reality that is always assuredly there?  Nietzsche’s response is simple: the motivation is weakness in the face of chaos and flux of becoming, realism is but an escapist fantasy, a support group for the weak (”Too overwhelmed with chaos, change and becoming are getting you down, have no friends and nowhere to go, join Realism Support Group this Wednesday”)  In this sense, realism as a belief in the independent reality “out there” is akin to a religious outlook in its search for certainty and its way of dealing with the responsibility to create one’s own world.  This “realism as religion” view is also confirmed, Braver writes, by the simple observation that “God is the oldest and obvious example of an independent reality issuing commands.” [117]  Braver has a section on Nietzsche’s specific takes on “realism” and a section on “anti-realism” which one can easily acquaint oneself with – everything is splendidly compared and contrasted there.  R5 Passive Knower and R1 Independent Reality are most obviously in trouble, and so is R2 Correspondence and R3 Uniqueness.  R4 Bivalence is out of the question as Nietzsche often addresses the issue of “black-and-white thinking” that has overcome philosophy lately.  R6 Realism of the Subject with its belief in a core, atomistic self is surely a myth aimed to help us deal with whatever it is that we are so need to deal with.

Third Week Response

First, thanks Jon for the chart. At one point, I toyed with the idea of making a “centerfold” chart of where each thinker falls along the various theses, but it didn’t come to anything. If I’m reading it correctly, it looks like columns d & e are flip sides of each other, where d prepares the ground for and motivates the move to e. And great Safranski quote—I haven’t read the book, but that quote sums up the ideas I was trying to express very nicely. I know nothing about Fitch’s Paradox, including what it is and why it’s paradoxical, so I’ll just sidestep that discussion, shelving it for later investigation.

I agree that the move Hegel, Nietzsche, and early Heidegger make in rejecting noumena (R1) somewhat resembles Berkeley’s claim that we have to examine what we really mean when we say that something exists, & that if we do, what we will find is much closer to their views than to realism, despite realism’s appearance of holding a monopoly on common sense. In effect, it’s a matter of shifting the burden from defending the reduction of reality to mere appearance (a realist’s view of idealism/anti-realism) to justifying the postulation of a world behind the world, one we can never see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, can never have any knowledge of, and which, qua noumena, can never impact us in any way (focusing on the theoretical for now), and yet which not only exists but constitutes the really real reality. Then, without a noumenal realm providing an invidious contrast with the world we experience, the “mere” attached to “mere appearance” or “merely apparent reality” drops away, and we are just left with the world. Hegel allows for reality unknown, but not in principle unknowable, arguing that all we mean by unknown reality is what we will eventually run across at some point in human inquiry. Like Peirce, the only sense we can make of an absolutely true account of the world is what we find at the ideal end of inquiry. The division between noumenon and phenomenon is not ontological, but temporal, historical.

New Series: Aesthetics and Philosophy

From the Continuum blog. A new series, Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory, edited by Hugh J. Silverman (Stony Brook University, New York, USA).

The series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today.

The first two books in the series, Derrida, Literature and War by Sean Gaston (Brunel University, UK) and Foucault’s Philosophy of Art by Joseph J. Tanke (California College of Arts, USA), are available now.

Isaiah Berlin on Shostakovich.

New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 12 · July 16, 2009

Shostakovich at Oxford

By Isaiah Berlin
The following letter from Isaiah Berlin to his friend Rowland Burdon-Muller about Dmitry Shostakovich’s visit to Oxford appears in Berlin’s Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, to be published in the US in late July. The book marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909.

June 28, 1958

Dear Rowland,

…Poulenc and Shostakovich have come and gone. Goodness, but it was a business. First a great fuss about the British Council which had arranged elaborately for a musical party for S. on Monday night (we were to entertain him on Tuesday and he was to get his honorary degree with Macmillan and Gaitskell on Wednesday), but the Soviet Embassy appears to be engaged in some kind of warfare with the British Council and more or less forbade him to have anything to do with them. The result was that the party was held without him, much bad blood, general indignation, telegrams, anger, tears. He finally materialised on Tuesday, and it was a wonderful business.

Life Inc: The Book

Douglas Rushkoff has written a new book–Life Inc– about the rise of corporatism begun in the Renaissance.  Here’s a blurb:

Taking on some of the biggest assumptions of our age, this is a book filled with dangerous ideas and rather unspeakable heresies(?!):

• Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
• Centralized currency is just one kind of money – one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
• Banking is our society’s biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
• Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
• The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe’s most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
• The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.
• Most importantly, Rushkoff shows how this moment of financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reinstate commerce and communities based in creating value for one another, rather than continuing to extract it for the benefit of institutions that no longer exist.

Well, ok. Not all that original (I think Marx clearly saw this , for one example), but Rushkoff has a nice way of popularizing and distilling ideas for the general reader and it just may be decent summer reading.  Here’s Rushkoff talking about his new book:

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Chapter 3: A Rejoinder

[All the discussions related to Braver Reading Group are here]

The conventional wisdom about the relationship between Kant and Hegel is that Hegel aims to “complete” Kant.  This, of course, describes fairly Hegel’s self-professed intention and is probably a scandalous pronouncement for anyone who considers Kant’s work already complete enough.  Whatever the case may be, it is of course clear that Hegel is reacting to Kant and therefore it is impossible to understand his most immediate motivations without Kant and Kant’s “paradigm,” as Braver labels it.  I would like to put forth some observations/questions regarding the overal development of Braver’s argument and regarding some of the connections between Kant and Hegel, possibly “defending” Kant in couple of places, but generally trying to be “neutral” with an eye of the prize.  So this is more of a thinking aloud type of rejoinder, as I think Jon raised a number of issues, even if, of course, there is plenty more in the chapter itself (it’s a long one, maybe a bit too long).  I will primarily address 3 sets of problems – (and none of these directed at Braver as a demand to clarify, I hope that such a simplistic attitude can be avoided in this reading exercise, plus the author is dead, right?):

More Derrida To Come?

Is there a flood of Derrida seminars about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting general public? An editorial note to the Russian review of recently released Séminaire La bête et le souverain: Volume 1 (2001-2002) claims that there are 40-50 volumes of Derrida seminars in all to be released. Say what? I’m not really sure where this information is coming from but the French review (PDF) of the above book does mention about 14 000 pages of Derrida material just waiting to be processed and published:

Infinity: Qualitative and Quantitative

Came across this passage from a letter Franz Rosenzweig sent to Hans Ehrenberg in 1918:

What does the irrational number mean in relation to the rational?  For rational numbers, infinity is an always unattainable limit, a forever improbable magnitude, even if it is of the order of certainty, of permanent truth.  With irrational numbers, on the contrary, at each of its points that limit comes up against rational numbers, almost physically, with the presence specific to numbers, thus liberating it from its abstract, linear and one-dimensional nature (from which its hypothetical status also proceeds), to confer a “spatial” totality and an obvious reality on it.  In the form of the infinitesimal number, infinity is the secret spring, forever invisible, of the rational number and its visible reality.  On the other hand, through the irrational number, infiinty is manifested, becomes visible, while forever remaining an alein reality: a number that is not a number, or so to speak a “non-number.”

What an interesting (and oddly clear) passage.  It’s a rather succint statement of  Rosenzweig’s conception of redemption (and critique of Hegel) and sheds a some light on how Rosenzweig approaches some of the problems  towards the end of the Star, e.g. progress, messianism, election and history.  Anyway, at long last I have gotten a hold of Stephane Moses’ recently translated The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem.  Time permitting, I’m hoping to throw together some thoughts about Moses’ text and more broadly, Rosenzweig sometime soon.