Observing left of Cygnus

Observing "left" of Cygnus and a bit "down" reveals first a prominent pair of stars and then a remarkable large triangle of stars.

What is lost when a culture no longer offers an OLD story about these ? Far from Deneb and Sadr, I would be happier with a story about Antares that preserved both its distance and its size relative to our Sol and, say, Betelgeuse.

What is most worrying is if we lose the habit of observing the night sky, whether we construct our own asterisms or follow the houses of constellations from The East or from The West or those of a sci-fi series gone viral or whatever.

Observing the night sky through a lens has aspects which would surprise ... whether "splitting" binary stars or learning to "SEE" faint non-stellar objects.

Arendt missed so much when she went after the telescope, mouthing the certainties that Heidegger had flung at his old master, Husserl. The sons of Husserl are a story so unlike the Heidegger story.

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organelle, pebble, straw, plow

If, in the course of evolution, species A incorporated members of B as organelles, how is the problem thus solved different from the members of Aves species C ingesting selected pebbles or members of Corvus selecting and bending a straw, stalk or stick  ?

Heidegger's chief error may have been his faux insight into tekne (technique, Technik.) Husserl's second bit of folly was to follow Heidegger on the telescope.

Compare : a philosophical anthropology of play, dance and concept.

[ the chorus heard in response : "Heidegger was not doing philosophical anthropology !" ]

What offended Heidegger were the diesel tractors in the fields.  He took the trains to see and talk with Jaspers on Jaspers' wife's small inheritance (from a business venture?) and would one day take an aeroplane.

[ the chorus : Heidegger and Husserl were on a hike together ... ]

When the hike began, Husserl was going on a hike with Heidegger, but when they returned, Heidegger had taken Husserl somewhere the old professor need not have gone - or gone along with ( mit-fahren ) ...

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kanji for Heidegger

昭 light in the clearing

永 for Parmenides and Heraklit

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Ernst Nolte on the modern West

An effective reply to Ernst Nolte advancing Heidegger's whitewash of the Nazi regime in Poland would be that the modern Pole's had defeated the Bolshevik army - and decisively so, as demonstrated by the terms of the Peace of Riga.

This leaves untouched the assessment of the mechanization of increasingly remote warfare with the persistence of mass human slaughter.

It also should be replied that the "West" has its roots in the the geometry of Egypt, the arithmetic of Babylon, the Semitic script and the Arab numerals : these are what the technical inventors in Asia did not produce.

The very possibility that a Jew named Jeshua, a former stone-cutter called "Nazarene" raised in Roman-occupied territory, was an itinerant healer formed further east in adulthood as a Buddhist healer, should put Heideggerian history to rest.  The realization of what Heidegger borrowed from the teacher of his Japanese student should complete the reassessment of Heidegger, original thinker, as a perverter of Luther-convert Husserl's later phenomenology.

That leaves all of the interesting issues open: why modern science did not emerge in China, Korea or Japan; the evolutionary role of aggression within groups in the perpetuation of slaughter; the fate of other hominid species; why the elephant could not be respected in western China in light of the fate of mega-fauna elsewhere; today's Japanese resistance to the facts of genetics and the migrations in southern Asia; the explanation of the racial myths of the nation-states; ...

The formulas of the butchers in Kampuchea were from doctrines out of Germany taught in forming doctoral students of economics in Paris.  The fanatic suppression of representative democracy and individual dissent in the name of inspired doctrines and personality cults is what unites the regimes of Bolshevik Moscow and Nazi Berlin.  The intolerance of even suspected or merely possible dissent has itself no connection to "technique" or "modernity".  Lenin's Cheka and the restored death penalties have their parallel in Germany less than 2 decades later as does the suppression of Mensheviks with that of the SA.

A more useful comparison than the SS with Khmer Rouge would be Stalin and Mao in the extermination of peasants prosperous enough to have time for opinions and policies in local matters and in fostering a provincialism incompatible with central dictates.

And to come full circle: the Russian attitude to the Poles cannot be equated to that of the Nazi racialists on the fate for all Slavs.

As for the big question: the German cities closed to Jews had not needed Cossacks to invent Pogrom - and long before the Reformation.  So much for the Swabian insights of Martin and Ernst Juenger in philosophy of world historical process according to an imagined Heraclitus and an imagined Parmenides.

Footnote: that the doctrine of the Tao became a religion with a godly pantheon might have troubled Herr Heidegger in his version of Buddhism at second-hand.

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Complicity of Celan in the Palestinian plight?

The post at Barbaric Document on Paul Celan's complicity in Middle East injustice somehow offends.

Is the author unaware of the little pogrom in Poland after the war's end?  That some 300,000 hid their identities and remain hidden?

That in the DP camps the western nations were complicit in the Zionist effort to redirect refugees to Palestine?

Where were they to go? Back home to Marburg?  Evict the new tenants?

Where were they to go? Alexandria?

Stalin's little Jewish republic in the far east of the USSR?

Where were Polish Jews to go?  Rumanian Jews (not yet "Romanian") ?  Hide behind non-Jewish names, cover names which may never been their own?

Why was the state of Montana not their destination? Or Paraguay?  Or Stalingrad?

Where is Galicia now?  Where was the Swabian Jew to call home?

Some tried: Frank never reached his destination in Marburg.  G. Husserl tried for some justice in Kiel.

And Sussana Ginzburg - a Ukranian Jew or a Polish Jew? Oh, I see, dead.  Nationality irrelevant if the corpse was not found.  And have I not mis-spelled her surname?

I have no answer: the borders of Europe were not about to dissolve; the Americans and Canadians did not want Jews.  At least not ordinary Jews.  Let alone Polish Jews. Ukrainian Jews.  "Rumanian? [turns to his uniformed colleague] Rumanian - is that more like Serbian or more like Czech?"

Never underestimate the ignorance of an immigration bureaucrat.

Of course, by the 1950's the high north of Arctic Canada was in need of "inhabitants" to justify a "border" between Russians and Americans ... "Any of your Jews good at spearing walrus?" [Canada paid compensation to those victims but refused to apologize.]
They lured in aboriginals from the south - into canvas tents in the highest arctic with no moose - yes, walrus as moose.

And who all was complicit?  Would a show trial or two help to clarify which artists are to be banned from the first union and relegated to the second or third artists' unions?  Do we campaign to snatch back the Nobel Prize of Symborska?

Note: neither of my paternal great-grandfather nor my maternal grandfather seem to have set much store by the border known at the 49th parallel.  My maternal great-grandfather may have ignored it and his father ended defending it while his maternal grandfather ignored it (while fearing the Sioux and preying on the Blackfoot ...)

When will I be invited back to claim my block of land or rock in the Orkney Islands?  In the Jura.  In Ireland.  In Blackpool.  Among the Swampy Cree of the rivers flowing into the western shore of whatever we will rename Hudson's Bay.

When will the Navajo south of Grants, NM, acknowledge me as a cousin and fit to share the water that I might view the pristine night sky above the ancient fields of lava of El Malpais?

And yet I share some of this - after learning of the deception Paul Ricoeur and his sometime colleague, Mircea Eliade.

Tarski or Heidegger: 1929 and 1930

From the years 1929 and 1930, Heidegger has left behind the work that marks his break with Husserl and phenomenology and some very clear signs of his embrace of Ernst Jünger and a radical conservative revolution - and an extreme cult "historical" nationalism that Heidegger never renounced and for which he never apologized to its victims - especially the Polish (mourning to Marcuse only the displaced Ost-Deutschen - the theme he likely took with Paul Celan.)

Tarski, on the other hand, left logic with ground-breaking work in each of those years.  One reason that I mention this is that Tarski was the teacher of Julia Robinson.

We now know the role that Husserl played in the fate of both Edith Stein and Afra Geiger: Heidegger worked briefly with the former and Hannah Arendt mentions the latter in her correspondence with him.  Jaspers reports being with Heidegger at Husserl's home in Freiburg and raising the case of his student, Afra Geiger.

Afra Geiger's fate was to perish in the Ravensbrück death camp.

Had Afra Geiger been accepted by Husserl, had Husserl not written his back-handed letter on Stein to the Göttingen philosophy department (and had they met in the open) both young philosophers might have survived.

When a young philosophy student - about to graduate - remarked to me that his university, having no graduate school, had no course on Heidegger - I tried to explain that this was no loss.  Better a course on Jaspers or Cassirer.  I should have said: better a course on Twardowski and Tarski.

And what of Cassirer? In 1942, Susanne Langer publishes "Philosophy in a New Key".  To read its last chapter and then the gnome's 1943 publication, "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" is very sobering.  Imagine for a moment that Langer had any reason to feel that some lectures of hers in Germany in the early thirties had led to some misplaced enthusiasm for conservative extremism - imagine with what feeling she would have announced a correction, a clarification, in 1943 - or in subsequent editions.

Cassirer, like Paul Valéry, died in 1945 and so was not able to reply to Heidegger when he resumed teaching at Freiburg after his all-too-brief exclusion.  Valéry on poetry or Heidegger?  Michael Hamburger on Mallarmé or Walter Biemel deferring to the Master?

When Heidegger opens his lecture on Hölderlin and the Essence of poetry, he make a fallacious claim which Tarski would have disposed of immediately.  So even there, perhaps better Tarski on Mereology for poetics (which via Kit Fine leads back to the Husserl of the LU) than Heidegger on fate, the people and historical up-rising.

Celan, Heidegger, Todtnauberg

Paul Celan was the name of Paul Ancel, a Rumanian Jew.  Unlike Slavo-phobe Heidegger, he learned Russian.

The poem Todtnauberg begins with the name of the flower Arnica, the Arnica montana of Linnaeus.  This is a flower of Central Europe; when found elsewhere, it has escaped.

The next word is "Augenbright", named by Linnaeus Euphrasia officinalis.

No reading of the poem can ignore these two choices, for Heidegger had mocked time and again the sciences of genus and species.

The attack on reason would place astrology on a footing - grounds - with astronomy.  Consider this. Was there a "dipper" attached by a chain to the water pump at Heidegger's well?

Astronomy has made us a great gift: careful measurement of motions over time - no matter how mocked by the Master - have revealed that the "Dipper" will not remain with that form eternally, for it is a loose cluster of stars passing through our neighbourhood and may be the best clue of the origins of our sun, her sisters long lost, un-nameable, in the multitude, unlike the sisters of Kafka, lost in that other procession.

Should we mock Leibniz for the mere technology of pumping water from the mines?  Should we mock the "School of Mines" for graduating a right-wing fanatic into French politics?

More than one Russian poet was linked to geology, but here we have the poet and botany (Germany long claimed parts of Denmark as their own.)

The appropriateness of names to named appears early in philosophy: and now, later, the Central European speakers of a "romance" language ask that we name them "Romanians" and not "Rumanians".

The word, "slovo" and fame, "slava", are linked to the feeble: "slabo" in the language that Heidegger did not learn - the language often free of the "copula", the "is".

To what extent Husserl's attack on Galileo in the name of "Lebenswelt" was an effort to respond to Heidegger on "Hantieren" that was not objectivized tekné is a painful subject and not the object of this note - this attention, here, surrounds the poet's two opening words, a series.

Steinwuerfel: the pump and the limitations imposed - as first known by Pascal - the vacuum - the limit - to any effort to raise clear, pure fluidity from the depths.

The stone cast, the die cast, the Centurians and the mantle - Schicksal, geschicht, geworfen, the yellow stars, Sterne, Arnika montana, of the open alpine field; Augentrost, the white stars of Central Europe, dense yellow suns at their core.  All of them, pseudo antheria, unlike the linden of the balanced trunk, symmetrical, but with the single bract.

for Robert Schwab of Freiburg U. and environmental justice, for the trip to the Martin-Heidegger-Weg with Herbert Korte, June 1985 (after the Kiel Weyl Centenary.)  the squab

Note: Sabu's pre-Linnaean collection is acquired by Peter I for his "Kunsthalle", east of Heidegger's lost Ost-Deutschen of Koenigsberg [Kaliningrad] - for what can become of "human Dasein" [das deutende Volk] without Ost Preussen?  Heidegger nowhere quotes Akhmatova of the City of Peter.

notes:
Stein, Kamen (russ.) Kamin (dtsch + russ)
Trunk - Pitb (russ) Glotok / Glossa
history, mines and wells: the fate of slaves to dig wells; Sterne in daylight from the well
Wuerfel - Kube (Kyb - russ) The sphere squared: the "cross" experiments of Heidegger's diagrams.
pagan, superstition, crafts, symbol: the Aryan cross, the star of David
the orphans in the woods ( Waisen / Syroti ) wessen Namen
das Buch der Hoffnung
Knueppel / Придерживаться / Băţ

Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes

In 1949 Heidegger had the opportunity to a add a preface to the 3rd edition of his Vom Wesen des Grundes.  He took the occasion to close an additional preface as follows:

Wie wäre es, wenn die Besinnlichen begännen, auf diese seit zwei Jahrzehnten wartenede selbe Sache endlich denkend einzugehen?

When you hear that Heidegger was unapologetic, it can help to remember that twenty years earlier he had celebrated a Fest for Husserl in the company of Edith Stein with whom he had worked on the Husserl texts for inner time consciousness.  Stein had since perished in the Holocaust.
Let us turn to the ending of the book:

dem Dasein als Selbst das Erwachen der Antwort des Mitseins, im Mitsein mit dem es die Ichheit darangeben kann, um sich als eigenliches Selbst zu gewinnen.

It is difficult to read such a closing passage knowing that the Master had a chance to add a thoughtful rewording with less of Self and individual.  Consider this: his one case of collaboration also dates back to 1928 (the year he says gave us his Kant book and this book on "grounds" or "reasons") and in his editor's introduction to that book he suggests that Edith Stein had worked on it as a steno who had added the chapter and paragraph divisions to a "transcription".

Nothing in the closing of the Grounds book evokes You or We.  This is the author who ridiculed Schelling as being a mere "thinker" and not a "philosopher" - this is Heidegger who took the concept of "horizon" and "Eigenwelt" and reached his greatest depths of profundity in evoking the "world" and "transcendence".

So in some matters he was a thoughtless fool and ingrate.  But he also seems to suggest that this book has been denied its readers those past twenty years - and that it is what they have been waiting for (Heidegger is at the time not banned from publishing but banned from teaching.)  What grounds might we have for distrusting the insight of the Master?

One reassuring possibility for his concerned, thoughtful reader is that the mere Schrift of an Edith Stein on empathy and others could not be expected to have interested Heidegger - or yet another possibility is that he also repeatedly neglected to actually read the work of his former lover and later confidante, Hannah Arendt.

But there is a philosopher with whom he will not now be able to communicate, an author who converted to the Catholicism of his youth, with whom he worked closely, the trusted secretary of his own former Master - Edith Stein.

To turn Heidegger on himself: we need not ask for the "reason" that he makes no mention, exposes no regret, but we can be open to someone evoking the "ground" for this neglect.

Poet and astronomer (amateur) in response to Heidegger

Any amateur poet (unpublished in any book by third parties, itself a book devoted principally to poetry) who is also an amateur astronomer (whether by sundial, lunar records, binoculars, azimuth-mounted telescope or other telescope either solar or astral, reflector or refractor, planetary or nebular or spectrographic) may wish to reply to Herr Heidegger.
It has long been claimed that a geocentric viewpoint is of more value in navigation on the seas than a heliocentric viewpoint.  Heidegger was concerned more with hiking than with celestial navigation, but some matters can be addressed to his followers.
The heideggerian speech among those with a reverence for Being can be compared to communication among those making astronomical observations: this need involve no technology.  Somewhat north of the Mediterranean, the stars which are visible throughout the night travel about in the heavens as would indicate the thumb of the right-hand outstretched when facing north (what techno-trolls call "counter-clockwise") while some considerable distance south of that Sea, the stars visible all night have no central star about which they swing, but swing they do, as indicated by thumb of the outstretched left-hand when facing south.
Heidegger was very fond of notes left by ancients, so we can imagine how disconcerting [throwing them for a loop] that those to the north should read that only a few thousand years earlier, the stars of the northern summer sky swung about a major star such as that of the Lyre.
The structuralists should have been able to demonstrate that to the south lay left-handed languages and to the north lay right-handed languages.  The heideggerian could explain that the technology of the pack camel and the barge had led to commerce which had allowed these languages to be polluted and the origins lost.
Worse yet, the moon far south of the Mediterranean in the reverse of the moon far to the north: both see a "man in the moon" but for one the grey Mare are an eye, for the others a mouth.  This heresy is easily disposed of by condemning the idolatry of the lunar images and the technology of charcoal on parchment.
But surely we are not doomed to be unable to communicate the peculiar balancing of the crescent moon such that it face one way in the heat of summer in the north while it sets facing quite the other way far to the south and yet never sets in the east when south nor rises in the west when the observer is south.
Heidegger on the search for "grounds" rightly reminds us that all understanding and explanation occurs against a background and in a situation in which the wonder of the world makes itself available to itself and in which the friend is willing to listen or the wise one willing to speak, the better slaves permitted to pose questions at the end and the women content to quietly serve beer or mead or peppermint tea.

[Husserl began as a student of astronomy, whatever his reservations later about the epistemology of Galileo]

Marburg University clinic and the psychiatrists

Yes, I am back on the subject of Marburg: 2012 will be the centenary of Hermann Cohen leaving the university and still the tourist town will not have named a street for him (unlike Paul-Natorp in Cappel.)

The university further disgraced itself by the hiring it engaged in immediately after the war.  Perhaps you think I exaggerate?

Here is a quote from the Schilpp volume (1957, 1981) for Karl Jaspers (the later edition contains his comments on Heidegger.)  I will quote Kurt Kolle of Munich University (Psychiatry and Neurology) on page 457 (the later edition cleverly preserved pagination) in his criticism of a naive Jaspers:

[objections to Jaspers'] rigorous condemnation to any kind of eugenic measures; Jaspers denies that 'degeneration' is an 'inescapable process.'  The present writer believes that Jaspers does not sufficiently take into account the total rise of the population which carries with it the danger of the suppression of valuable minorities, the increase of inferiors and the gradual dying out of the white races

The entire paragraph is worth reading for the paragraph which follows on Jaaspers for anyone who has to deal with human beings.  Not treat, understand or attempt to heal or cure: deal.

The medical profession and especially the academic wing, embraced the National Socialist programme.  It had meant a real prospect for a social corrective in the forced sterilization of the unfit.  They had made a great deal of progress at Hadamar prior to the failure of the Wehrmacht to defeat the Slavs.

The consolation to the eugenic-minded practitioners: that the tiny German minority might yet survive in the face of the Slavic hordes and the yellow masses, the swarming brown-skinned inferiors.  You really must read in this the one great consolation they could take: that so many Slavs had been prevented from reproducing through the natural coial porcess of warfare.

You think that I exaggerate.  Surely I exaggerate.  They sat over their coffees or beers and talked about the outcome of the war: here they were, back at their research, and what would an objective assessment be - a scientific assessment of the outcome and of their research prospects and prospects to influence social policy.

We lament the failure to de-nazify eastern Germany and Austria: but there could not be the luxury of de-nazification of the psychiatrists because too careful screening would mean having to engage foreign-trained staff - and you know what that means.

While it was thought a service to philosophy to re-isse the expanded Schilpp volume with Jaspers view of Heidegger, the real value is in having preserved the essays by Kolle, Arendt and Ricoeur.  It is to be hoped that the volumes available as microfilm will be preserved as digital resources.

Documents with evidence concerning the beds being "freed" at the Marburg Anstalt - freed for use by slave labor at Stadtallendorf Nobel Dynamite - are archived here at the University of Minnesota in what had been the remnant of the German colony at Memphis, now 'ethnically polluted' but fortunately in one of the bastions of modestly cosmopolitan and liberal mid-west America.

Heidegger and science

The great things about youtube is the occaisonal gem: one such is Martin Heidegger on physics.

There was an old canard about i the 50's that relativity was understood by only a handful of physicists.

In Heidegger's moth this becomes quiet different: it begins with his notion that the new way to thinking can be followed by only a few - but that is reaaly not so unusual.  To dispel the notion that this elete might result from mere obscurantism he offers his listener the case of the radio "Apparat" and the television "Apparat".  You will be surprised to learn that these both required relativity - and that the physics underlying both is under stood by only 5 or 6 physicists.

Perhaps he meant only 5 ot 6 philosophers.  Let's see: 1964 ... Hermann Weyl had died in 1955; Paul Valéry had dies in 1945; Einstein had dies in 1955; Cassirer had dies in 1955; Hans Reichenbach in 1953 - maybe Heidegger was right!  Death had taken them all!  But Russell of the ABC's lived until 1970 - and Grunbaum on space-time came out in '63 in English - and was fundamentally mistaken on the relativism of any space-time metric ... so that leaves Feynman, Bethe, Gell-Mann -- no, what about John Wheeler, 1962 - oops, in English.  Besides he may have meant physicists in Bavaria or even physicists known to have praised Heidegger's thought-experiments in the philosphy of time ...

What I really hope is that he heard it from Husserl who was only having some fun at Heidegger's expense.

a note on ad hominem consideration of a line of argument

ad hominem is sometimes lumped together with attacking the example someone chose to illustrate a point rather than their argument [or, if you insist, "the" argument.]

But consider Michael Martin on R. Taylor's case for teleology and design.  Martin's 1990 book reports that Taylor had occasion to respond to critics but that he did not reply (although someone sympathetic to his argument, Creel, did reply.)

When we are asked to consider such things as "I think that what Philo was trying to say ... " or "I think that what Philo may have intended was ..." then the failure to respond can be more than a refusal of dialog - especially so if the argument or line of thought has been published as a non-specialist text.

In Taylor's case, his book "Metaphysics" was not aimed just at the specialist, but also at a more general reader and likely had the philosophy student in mind.

That an effort to defend or clarify is seen to fail, is one thing. To fail to make that effort is quite another.  Whether due to arrogance, or unwillingness to retract, or due to pride or neglect, it is a moral failing of the philosopher.

Sometimes the philosopher's choice of where to speak can be likened to the choice of a regrettable example.   Peter Singer launched a storm of irrational and emotional protest by proposing to speak on medical ethics and the termination of life at Uni. Marburg/Lahn.  This location was construed as no idle choice for the organizers and no doubt Singer was ignorant of the history of the Marburg University medical clinic in the Nazi "T4" program (and the university's readiness to hire Nazi medical staff after the war.

To make matters worse, Marburg, untouched in the war, failed to rebuild the great synagogue destroyed in the November Pogrom.  Marburg and the surrounding area had failed to find even a small lane to bear the name of Hermann Cohen (other streets bear the names of academic notables - Cohen merited only a small plaque at the old university.)  For years the inscription at the old site was in memory of those residents of Marburg who feel in the war ( a slight variant on typical village memorials to Great War heros which one finds in small towns in the area.)

Once Marburg psychiatric housing had been emptied, it served to house slave labourers for the Noble dynamite factory at near-by Allendorf (per documentation at the archive of the University of Minnesota.)

Historians indicate that public objections to Action-T4 had an affect on the Nazi regime: there is no historical record that any public objections by Marburg notables were ever made such as might have served to spare the Jews of Marburg, the home of theology and philosophy and sometime home to the industrious Brothers Grimm.

When a philosopher from Marburg says nothing (Heidegger never returned to Marburg to urge the rebuilding of the synagogue - nor did the illustrious Hannah Arendt) it can be as serious a concern as when a philosopher choses to advocate mercy killing in a town which has yet to come to terms with its complicity in willful human slaughter.  It brings into question who is that "we" who are ready to engage Peter Singer in that particular dialog no matter how impressive his line of argument.  The city of Marburg is not yet that place.  Tourists arriving to see the St Elizabeth church and enjoy shopping in the quaint streets are able to enjoy their visit most often without having once to consider who is missing from the scene.  A building advertises the Grimm brothers worked here; no building says "the family Rosenberg had a business here prior to ..." or "This house was purchased below market price after the Rosenberg family ...".  They need not advertise: but the plaque needs to be there to be read by this generation and the next and perhaps even one more after.  And the synagogue must be rebuilt.  link: History page of the tiny renewed Jewish community of Marburg.

Replying to Husserl: working notes

prima facie case for revisiting Husserl: the merits of Colin McGinn's phenomenology in Mindsight
   pdf review
and his treatment of Hume; compare and contrast with Husserl's responses to Hume

...
Iris Murdoch on Husserl in MGM and various in S of G ex: the lack of a telos.
...
Science and the Nations:  Raymond Aron (irony, RA introduced J-P S to Huss and Heid)
   RA on philosophy of history
   the effort to prohibit aerial bombardment through amendments to Geneva conventions
   the case for international law
...
  1935  Husserl on the gypsies as outside European life though present throughout
  wp
         In 1934, Reinhardt and Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France"
...
  EH and the West - as if there had not been China or India - or Jerusalem.  The assimilated Jewry of Europe in shock and dismay at the threat to the "immanent telos" of civil society and academe - and within 2 years he is driven out - within 3 years out of his home - and dead.  Q:  the fate of his wife and son?
   Despite his comment on India, if in fact Jeshua the Nazarene had studied as a Buddhist healer in India, this cultural gap would not be as he imagines - and the fact that these Causcasians are speaking an Indo-European language?  But he is looking for his European entelechy (if this had been embraced, would Poland have been spared?  Where did Russia stand in this group? )
...
  Was his Europe (1935) based more on Greece or more on the Salic laws ?  This was not a remnant of a Greek Empire but a Roman Empire - and on its northern fringe, the Salic traditions.  That Greek world came ot Europe through Arabia - but to a Europe that already had something of an "ethos" very distinct from that of Ionia or Athens or the Attic.  His mathematics - a mix of Greek and Indian and Arab and then European.
...
Science without universals: (contra Husserl's characterization of the actual practice of science)
   the particular star, Sol
   a particular planet [but one of a family of terrestrial planets, yet the only one with oceans and continents]
   plate tectonics
   a particular instance of carbon-based life on a planet
   DNA/RNA - only one particular form of life
   Luna - the moon illusion
   Galileo and the one planet Jupiter - Q:  a brown dwarf or not?  A singluar-historical question?
   the one cosmos [cp: Lee Smolin ]

   the inability to reduce mathematics to logic
...
  the conflation of "appearances" and the "data" of science (the Humean error )
...
   Bacon
   technical mastery of nature
     Leiss "The Domination of Nature"
...
  EH on the "validity" of his phenomenological discovery/adumbration of a world as horizon of an experience

  IM  literary criticism in contrast to physical science: freedoms and constraints, the good and the true

It seems clear that Husserl's views on science in the early 1930's came to colour what was known as phenomenology for decades in the English-reading philosophy world.

In particular, authors such as Charles Taylor have a certain appeal to some readers based on the presumed case against "natural science" where the "human sciences" are concerned.  Taylor often refers to Habermas and Habermas takes the Husserl case against natural science as a given - only he goes a step or two further.
A large part of the case against "secularism" hearkens back to the doctrine that an attitude perhaps appropriate in "natural science" is misplaced in the humanities - and in advise to our leaders both political and academic.

In the days when behaviourism and instrumentalism passed as scientific psychology and philosophy of psychology, respectively, in North America, I was sympathetic to this case against "the natural attitude" in considering the prospects for "human psychology".  My sympathies have since shifted to the need for a philosophical anthropology which might better inform our assessment of scientific psychology in terms of goals, means and presuppositions.

Quentin Lauer's 1965 translation of a post-1935 "Crisis in Science" essay gave English readers access to what previously had been largely eluded to in the more popular literature on the existential phase of phenomenology

The casual reader of the "Krisis" essay might be advised to realize that Husserl had spent a great deal of time with some of the most prominent thinkers in twentieth century mathematics, such as Cantor at Halle.

Why might this be well-advised?  Take for example the 1994 book published by Northwestern U: Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We". In his brief treatment of Heidegger's own engagement in politics, there is no mention of Jaspers.  The one mention of Husserl is merely in passing, late in the text.

By 1935, on this view, Heidegger had outstripped his master and by 1937 the master would indeed be stripped. This despite the long-standing concern of Husserl for the I and the others.  Heidegger, with no background in mathematics or science and impressed by language (the "furrow" of the field is indeed a very old part of "culture" but Heidegger never actually farmed a field or handled a plow - his favoured tools were the pen, the pipe, the walking stick, the Bavarian cap and sturdy hiking boots.  Elfride handled the technology of cookery) took his cue from Duns Scotus.  Working under Rickert and Husserl (Husserl would take Rickert's chair at Freiburg), Heidegger finds his later themes in an author, Duns Scotus, immensely far removed from the author who most concerned Kant and then Husserl: Hume.

Anecdote: some years ago I spent an evening listening to Mahler with a prominent British philosopher - a philosopher specializing in mathematics and space-time geometry.  That evening he told me of how impressed he was by his current reading of Arendt on the Nazi in Jerusalem - particularly concerning what he had now learned about the Danish King and the Nazis.  Looking back, I see that evening as just one more in a series that led inexorably to his divorce.  Philosophers can be fundamentally mistaken about a great many things, especially experts in quite narrow fields.  In their wider reading, they may rely much more on the rhetoric, the style, the tone of an author than they would in reading within their specialty.  A philos0pher of physics inclined to advocate a humane socialism has little time for casual reading and is likely to eschew writing by known conservatives - the tone, the rhetoric, risks being too aggravating to be suited to a relaxing distraction for the strenuous mental tasks of professional specialization.

Husserl ventured to speak very generally.  His rhetoric is not essential to an argument, but it is essential to his having readers of his argument. I would like to consider that rhetoric.

"Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" begins with a bit of a howler: the analogy we are offered is that concerning scientific medicine versus folk medicine.  Why this analogy?

It is not merely that every sort of superstition was flourishing in Europe ... that was nothing new.  True, inexpensive printing had created a wider audience for novel variants on old themes, but I suggest, there was nothing really new.  What Husserl was addressing was the Heidegger phenomenon.

[ Claude Bernard on medicine;  Jaspers and Hans Jonas; current:  GC
    JB  JV  C d Fr  chaires  2 femmes  disparus  immortels  discours   podcasts  
    CIP  JFP   CT  "the immanent frame"  SSRC  R & PS  S of R   JH contra 

]

[ la leçon inaugurale M-P   I.H.

Anne F-L [Chaire De Philosophie Des Sciences Biologiques Et Médicales - Leçon Inaugurale Anne Fagot-Largeault  PDF

Les expressions « sciences de la vie et de la santé », ou « sciences biologiques et médicales », qui sont d’usage courant, sont redondantes. Les sciences médicales font évidemment partie des sciences biologiques.
...
La philosophie des sciences est ma formation première, la médecine une formation seconde.
...
« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
...
Etre médecin n’est pas neutre philosophiquement.
...
L’évolution scientifique de la médecine, c’est-à-dire l’incorporation à la médecine des impératifs de la recherche, et d’une recherche instrumentée, technologique, est souvent assimilée à une déshumanisation. D’aucuns parlent de « barbarie technoscientifique », de « glissade vers l’enfer biomédical ». Et ce qui est souvent préconisé pour éviter la dérive technoscientifique est un retour en arrière. On cherche dans les médecines dites douces des recettes ancestrales, on rêve d’un « retour à Hippocrate » (thème récurrent et illusoire, car la médecine hippocratique se voulait rationnelle, et elle n’était pas douce).
]

[ R & SS Coll de Fr ]
[attacks on medecine as quackery: Molière, Flaubert]
[ the reality of palliative care; morphine and the death of Freud; thanatology; euthanasia ]
[Mengele and the spectre of medecine; psychiatric abuses in the West and in USSR ]
[ link

Georges Canguilhem : Philosophie et Médecine

10/06/2005, Collège de France, Paris

]

[Collège de France - Recherche en psychiatrie : pathologies multiples, modèles communs ? link ]

[Conférence "Merleau-Ponty, Le corps en acte" Collège de France (Inv. by Bernard Andrieu) link]

[Colloque de rentrée, les 15 et 16 octobre 2009 link pdf  ]

[U of C  SCNL  ]

[ru  IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day  ]

[Egbert Scheunemann

"Habermas‘ Philosophie ist der Versuch, das Projekt der Moderne, also die Entwicklung

der modernen Zivilisation, als – in der Tradition Kants – dreigestaltige Rationalitätsentfaltung

zu begreifen: als Prozess der Differenzierung der kognitiv-instrumentellen, der

normativ-praktischen und der ästhetisch-praktischen Vernunftsdimension sowie der immer

weiteren Ausdifferenzierung dieser Dimensionen entsprechend immanenter Logik."

]   PKR  

There is a common view today that Heidegger had somehow brought Husserl to his senses.  I am troubled by this view: Heidegger's major contribution to Husserlian phenomenology had been his work with Husserl's assistant, Edith Stein, in preparing "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" lectures for publication.  Husserl had a history of dissatisfaction with his own formulations and a history of quasi-new beginnings, more often new forays with the same problematic in mind.  Now he was faced with the rising star of Heidegger.  No other figure on the intellectual scene had so embraced his phenomenology.  I imagine Husserl struggling to grasp what was becoming of his hard-won achievements in regions, passive and active genesis, co-constitution, Urwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt in the metaphysics/ontology rhetoric of Heidegger.

Husserl's next fallacies are double: reductionism and the notion that social institutions are formed of their individual members.  Let us being with the latter.  Take Heidegger and Arendt's own Marburg: the social institutions of Marburg were in no way disrupted either by the burning of the great synagogue (never rebuilt) in Marburg or the loss of the community of Jews in that university town with its theology college.  True, there is no Hermann-Cohen Weg or Strasse - but there is a small plaque at the old university.

[ reductionism  ( ex: Freud to Binswanger;)  agency, action, causality ]
[ intentionality reference mental-contents ]
[ dasein versus "the person"; public | personal | private ]
[ psychologism ]
[ mechanism and explanation ]
[ mathematical objects ]
[ natural kinds and universals in language and in logic ]
[ history and Dilthey ]
[ cultural artifacts ]
[ intuition and insight ]

[science and the taste of the soup (Einstein)
   Zu-Hause-sein
   a typical morning at home over coffee with Bach: husband and wife (normal day, unremarkable)
      as circumstance to be described, to be explained, to be characterized, to be diagnosed
      as narrative
      as social "instance" - roles, gender, niveau, privacy, property, stability (peace time), religion
      non-remarkable conversation and inconsequential reading
      variant example: disclosure of infidelity
        objective risk to the spouse (Wien, Prag, Paris or Berlin 1935)
        objective assessment of the response of the injured party
        jurisprudence
        moral assessment, remembering and forgiving
        the medical viewpoint (Arthur Schnizler)
        as preserved as a poem
        as communicated in a letter (family; friend)
        social: stigma and reaction of significant others; penalties
]
Take the case of Estonia and its neighbours.  The towns do not vanish because their inhabitants have been shipped to Kazakhstan.
Take the case of Poland: a minor pogrom occurred even after World War II had ended.
The simplistic view that societal forms are built on the minds of the individuals found in them negates a century or more of Geisteswissenschaften.

[ Alfred Schütz, Adorno, Marcuse ]

Let's move on to the next rhetorical move: the mentions of infinities.  By 1935 some of Husserl's listeners should have known that "infinities" occurring in mathematics are an entirely different concern from "infinities" occurring in formulations in physics.  The topic cannot be introduced without a clear demarcation between mathematics and physics.  Essential considerations are glossed over.

Perhaps it is because Husserl was a Jew converted to Lutheranism that he failed to appreciate the supra-individual nature of a centuries old institution such as Heidegger's Catholic tradition.

Husserl proceeds with a rhetoric of "Theoria" already utterly biased ( a bias that will perpetuate in the work of Habermas) - a rhetoric devoid of the actual historical science required to explicate the rise of scientific medicine, the mathematization of mechanical motion, of optics and the nature of categories and classification in the emergence of modern chemistry.

In 1935, Husserl could not be expected to image that we would one day be obtaining positron-emission tomographs of individual brains during the performance of typical tasks.  In 1971, when I took biology with a new textbook, electron microscopes had not yet demonstrated the structural nature of the so-called "cell membrane" in relation to the so-called "nuclear membrane" in typical cells of our bodies.  A reticulating structure was named and some partial views offered.

Husserl could not have anticipated, any more than my own philosophy professors in the 1970's, that certain types of phenomena deemed unsuited to scientific explanation due to their "randomness" would fall prey first to catastrophe theory and then be encompassed in the domain of chaos theory (René Thom was only born in 1923.)  By the time Kolmogorov visited Gottingen, Husserl was in Freiburg.


What remains in how best to conceive of mind in relation to science.  Where Husserl would suspend metaphysics in the sense of "bracketing" ontological commitments which functioned as obfuscating presuppostions, Heidegger was already moving to his radical demolition, demotion, un-founding.  Husserl, anxious for a secure foundation for science which would not degenerate into sheer scientism where mathematics and human knowledge were concerned, had somehow abetted the launch of anti-science.


The problem with the rhetoric by which Husserl invites the listener, the reader, to consider his appeal for the need of a pure science of the essence of human spirit is that he has already needlessly undermined science and history in making his case.  His later readers would lump the failures of eidetic science with the failures of metaphysics and the greatest failure: science.  Husserl's openess to a certain relativism - a relavitism to which his own philosophy would be immune - was one of far too many concessions.


In some ways the very history of Husserl's phenomenology was its own undoing: his early sympathizers could not follow him into an idealism excused by its being "transcendental".  In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even the eidetic reduction itself would be rejected and phenomenology would merge into variant of a descriptive psychology only to be displaced by the structures of language and the very temporal, relativized, historicized achievements of aesthesis.


When Husserl urged that we recognize horizons, he could not have imagined the doctrine of our being cast into the historical world.  In his own case, it is hard to imagine a figure in philosophy less suited to making the case for a careful reassessment of the spiritual situation of Europe in 1935.


The eventual conflation of science with technique in Heidegger and of science with theoria infected with bias and disguised in social speech acts in Habermas may have slightly different routes, or "paths",  Habermas certainly made a serious reading of Husserl on "the natural attitude" but with an entirely different project in re-thinking the use of human knowledge in the social world.


What is perhaps a shame in hindsight is that we have few clues as to what Heidegger might have taught had he been allowed to resume teaching in Berlin or Heidelberg in the new academic year of 1945-46.  By that time, with Max Weber dead for a quarter century and had Jaspers been lost in a forced march (which, as it happens, he narrowly escaped) and with Elfride hosting faculty and student soirées, we might have more accounts of the view of the master on the triumph of American technology over the leading people of Europe - and the use that the Asiatic hordes might yet make of the technological devices shipped to them from America and now lurking in the East or of the need to reclaim Ost-Preussen, to restore the eastern border.


We have no idea of what Husserl might have thought and taught in the psot-war, as he had died a few months before Kristalnacht.


During the time that Arendt was hoping to see a Heidegger tome on Logik, no mention is made in their correspondence of the fate of the logicians of Warsaw, no mention of the Jews of Poland- as if this were some Polish issue - this despite the very origins of the family name, Nietzsche.


Where Heidegger had Duns Scotus, the salient philosophers for Arendt were Augustine and Plato - but in 1929, when Husserl was being honoured in the presence of Heidegger and Edith Stein, Arendt was only a student who had graduated with less than full honours the previous year (her dissertation had a routine printing in Berlin in 1929.)   Unlike Iris Murdoch [see John Bayley on home with Iris], Husserl and his wife were driven from their home [...]


Heidegger's most curious remarks are that the "Juden" lost were "Ost-Deutschen" - which perhaps he took to include those of Poland and Ukraine [see the exception of Bulgaria.]


[Arendt's 1926 semester under Husserl]


[Jaspers-Heidegger Korr./Briefwechsel ]


[Iris Murdoch on Husserl; on ethics - that an ethics must also point us toward the good and be itself informed by that good; cp Arent and Jaspers on the lack of character in Heidegger (a nice enough chap in his way, not generally offensive, as was his wife, Elfride) ]


[Heidegger's failure to mention Arendt; the lost dedication to Husserl; the break with Jaspers ]


[the rescue of the Husserl papers: imagine if this had been undertaken by Heidegger, or at his behest; Van Breda and the role of the Belgian government and diplomats in the 1938 rescue of the papers; look for corr. with Heid or leading pupil in Frei. or Hdlbrg]


[
Eh characterization of philosophy - without sufficient regard to the Stoics or the role of rhetoric and law; 
his neglect of poesis
]
[
EH on a norm within a life (was he thinking of MH here - when he says not developed in every person ??)
]
[EH account of the idea in history - cp.  the Tao and Confucianism
    the manner in which the Dao became a religion and ceased to be an ethos would not sit well here
    the manner in which a religio without temples became the religion of cathedrals (cp the origins of the synagogue
]
[events in Marburg and the failure to rebuild the 1897 synagogue (the only building "lost" in Marburg in 1933-1945]
[

The Nazi Persecution
of the Gypsies

Guenter Lewy

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

2000

]
[T4 link with Marburg
"
Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation
"
Marburg-related documents: (1)  + ease with which NS psychiatrists came to Uni Marburg after WWII