The CNN Insider: what CNN did not report

A CNN "Insider" page today failed to give any balanced view of the lies of their "source".

This was the "balanced" CNN web headline:

Group arrested not Christian or militia, insider says
By the CNN Wire Staff
March 30, 2010 9:35 a.m. EDT

which should remove any doubt that CNN is the garbage news of the web.

The Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia web page could not be clearer:

A well-armed citizenry is the best form of Homeland Security and can better deter crime, invasion, terrorism, and tyranny.

Of course, they do not say "better" than whom.  Your elected sheriff?  Your "paid" police chief? Our National Guard? The Coast Guard?  The Civilian Air Patrol? The NY Port Authority?  Protect us where?  In and around the Port of Los Angeles?  Are we not watching a "militia" at work breaking heads and terrorizing families in Teheran?  Is Hezbollah a fiction of the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Here is their previous "measured response" to CNN itself:

[...]

Americans want the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness restored and protected. We don't need to have every facet of our lives micromanaged down to the finest detail.

But there are people at every level of government who somehow think it is their divine right to interfere with, tax, regulate, and confiscate every single aspect of working Americans' lives. This is shameful, and it doesn't have to be this way.

But this is not the only issue causing the very pleasing and expected growth of pro-freedom militia groups. The threat of terrorism or disaster will always loom over our heads. Crime is a constant concern for many Americans. And while the threat of invasion seems at best a very distant, remote one, we would like to help keep it that way.
[...]

Lee Miracle (Weapon M), Coordinator
Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia
Michiganmilitia.com

Are they talking about the NTSB? The FAA? The IRS? The EPA?  In what sense must the "pursuit of happiness" be "restored" ?  Machine guns for all?  Or just assault weapons for militias? 
Further on they state:

If you are a United States citizen (or have declared your intent to become such), who is capable of bearing arms, or supports the right to do so, then YOU ARE the militia

Which non-citizens do they imagine have the right to bear arms in America?  Those who "declare" their support?  Declared where and to whom?  Canadian tourists with hunting permits?

At every level of government? Are they thinking of the Kansas territory and the 2nd Amendment?

Do they propose to replace State police with militia? City police with militia? The FBI with militia?

How will state militias better serve our airports, train stations, ports, fuel depots, refineries? Would they replace the Secret Service?

Can any nutter be quoted as an "inside" source by CNN for world-wide consumption? I can see no difference between the Hutaree web site which I visited yesterday and the SE MI Milita site which I visited yesterday in any "Christian" or "militia" essentials.

Jaspers and the animals

In his 1935 lectures printed as "Reason and Existenz", Jaspers contrasts the animal with the human.

Even at the time of the lectures, the concept of the organism in its environment was evolving (and offering hope to anti-Darwinians such as Heidegger, strangely enough.)

Today almost nothing that Jaspers says about animals in those lectures remains defensible.  While not as vulgar as Catholic Peter Geach in his treatment of "brutes" in Mental Acts, Jaspers fails to acknowledge any of the aspects of great apes, dolphins or elephants which now place them on a continuum with what had been seen as distinctively human: a minimal level of self-awareness, a minimal level of social learning, a minimal level of culture - and, in the case of the elephant, almost certainly grief.

What interests me is to see whether Jaspers' overall views of the person and a life with others could be revived and revised in a variant suitable for Alcoholics Anonymous.

By middle-age most of us have friends afflicted with alcohol addiction and among them likely one who has rejected AA for its requirement to acknowledge a higher power.  Jaspers thought is far more subtle than typical Christian-inspired theism and is free of the taint of Medard Boss and the Heideggerian "Daseinanalyse" movement.

Jean-Pierre Leyvraz and La Phénoménologie de l'Experience

Over at philpapers.org I have started a forum thread on Jean-Pierre Leyvraz and his 1970 book,  "La Phénoménologie de l'Experience".

The book should have been called "Traité des niveaux des actes d'unité" or some such because it is a phenomenology only in a peculiarly Heideggarian way - indeed the book would not even make sense to a reader conversant with European philosophy since Descartes who had not read Heidegger on Kant and the "problem of metaphysics".

The only copy that I could locate in a university library in Minnesota was a copy which did not yet have all of its pages cut (if you are not familiar with uncut pages, look for something on the web on quarto, signatures and folio in book binding.)  This one volume shows no sign of a prior careful reader (no erasures in any margins of the many cut pages) but had been bound crudely in a hard-cover "wrapper" using binding tape - the tape is now dry and exposes the following on the back cover under a layer of adhesive:

The author, J-P Leyvraz,

read French at Glosgow and Durham 1947-49
doctorat e. l., 1960
assistant U Geneva 1959-61
held a Swiss bursary 1960-62
privat docent U Geneva 1961
visiting fellow at Yale 1964-66

This book, completed in March 1969, appears to have led to his being assistant prof in philo at UG in 1969 and he is listed elsewhere as promu in 1970.

The preface to the book states that the first chapters were written under the Swiss bursary and the last chapters while at Yale under a Ford Foundation grant.

However the publisher states that the Yale years were under the American Council of Learned Societies.  Perhaps it was both and perhaps his Yale years were sponsored by French Studies or comp lit and not philosophy: this it should be possible ot clarify in due course.

Leyvraz's book could be a paradigm case for what Harry Frankfurt has termed "bullsh*t".  Almost any page at random contains what were already "howlers" by 1969.  It bears a strong "parenté" with the claims of Dufrenne in his book on aesthetics that Heidegger has proven this or shown that: in Leyvraz book it is all presumed as the background for his treatment of natural kinds and imagination.

One appalling claim is that in his treatment of a "set" [ensemble] and the imagination is not a psychological treatment as he does not appeal to a "faculté de imagination". 

The book is peppered with "donc" as if "therefore" or "thus" inserted here and there constitute either justification, argument or "grounds" for his arbitrary assertions.

Leyvraz went on to embrace Wittgenstein (who became a new mode in France) which is utterly bizarre given the treatment of language in the "phenomenology of experience" - except that as a Catholic he can take some comfort.  If this seems unfair, be assured that the very introduction of the book promises us that the book leads us to the very soul (ipséité) that Heidegger denied his readers and the very experience of the divine that is the business of theologians.

The claim by Leyvraz that the "niveau physique" somehow includes the "niveau mathématique" while assuring us that the organism in the "niveau biologique" is not in the geometrized world - while never distinguishing between epistemology and ontology let alone presuppositions, facts, propositions, hypotheses and theories places his book firmly in the anti-rational anti-science movement of "thought" as an alternative to philosophy (note the book is not entitled "Philosophy of Experience".)

What interests me now is the relationship of Leyvraz to the career of Kevin Mulligan in Geneva and that to Pascal Engel in Paris - and the Leyvraz of the 1977 sojourn as a Visiting Professor at Vassar College.  Much of what I may learn will have to remain confidential - but a comparison of the career of Leyvraz to that of Dallas Willard to that of Antonio Rappo and others (selected informally based on published abstracts and titles) will help this initial survey of careers in philosophy and other university "thought" departments from the viewpoint of the sociology of education take its first tentative, intitial form independent of the prevailing prejudices of "free theory" versus "hard science".  It is already apparent that "translation" plays an important role in many of these academic careers (why academics in America would require -and fund - French and German translations of technical texts is itself a troubling matter in the nation of Jefferson, Franklin and Wm. James.)

Amusement: I learned today that some "ontologists" in American philosophy departments consider that the "ontology" for WWW semantic web frameworks amounts to "applied ontology" and they are available as experts.  I wonder if they will also offer their services to Departments of Dentistry or Astrophysics just as Heideggerians so often offer their services to Departments of Nursing in the name of "Daseinanalyse".  To think of the fate of those unemployed nominalists as SemWeb takes form ...

If you are aware of any reputable work in philosophy which credits the "phenomenology" of Leyvraz, please post a comment.

In both his treatment of "l'imaginaire" and in the fact that as author on the book's cover Leyvraz appears not as "Jean-Pierre" but as "J-P" there is a hint that he may have imagined his book to rank with J-P Sartre's "Etre et le Néant".  Not.  But it falls not too many notches below.

Democracy in the Gulf: Bush Vindicated?

Democracy in the gulf - would that be Iran or Iraq?

The first great triumph of the Dulles CIA had been the over-throw of the elected government in Iran and the installation of the Shah as autocrat  (Operation Ajax - at which time Bush Sr. was only an occasional CIA "business" asset with regards to Mexico and Cuba), a victory leading us to deal with the fundamentalist revolution which ensued (Carter's failure there led to Reagan and then the Bush league.)

The last great triumph of the Tenet CIA was simply a failure to be heard as Cheney was confidently nudging the US into a war in Iraq ( although no Iraqi or Iraqi agent had attacked the USA and no Al Qaeda terrorists were based there.)

No need to mention the "outing" of Valerie Plame, which will just as likely be "vindicated" if the USA ever invades Nigeria.

Richard Hughes and Martin Heidegger: A High Wind in Jamaica

In the year 1929 that "Vom Wesen des Grundes" appeared also appeared Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.
Chapter 6 is the legendary account of Emily's self-discovery at about age 10: she is this Emily in this body and not another.  She climbs the rat-lines to the masthead and below the children play on that other "mortal coil" which Hughes' did not know not to have  "a huge coil of rope" (there is no "rope" on a ship - perhaps it was a 'hawser' to be used for towing a captive vessel.)

Hughes imaginative account may have been known to Lawrence Vogel in his discussion of a self which emerges in an "ethos".

Vogel's critical comments and observations on Heidegger and ethics gave rise to this variant: the village in the clearing, as a setting for a variant of Veza Canetti's Der Oger.

The old ladies are holding down a young girl who has offended a taboo: her life thereafter will be more circumscribed.  When the deed is done, her old Auntie reports back to the old men, the village elders, seated about in her husband's hut.

Henri Troyat repeats a tale that a Russian landowner had hanged in his courtyard a German tutor whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife.  This is the law of the home, the ethos.  Villages in hillsides the world over attest to its role in either inhibiting or incubating culture - or both.

It is reported that only 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust of which Heidegger would not speak.  In a letter from Arendt, we hear how the remaining tens of thousands of Jews in Germany were no longer enough to matter to the direction which Europe would take (even the prospect of the annihilation of Israel seems to leave her unconcerned.)

In my image of the origin of the ethos I see the old ladies of the Macaque troupe gathered around the slain elder male or I see the distraught mother elephant standing over her fallen calf.  We cannot look to ourselves to see our the origin of the possibility of seeing the other as we have come to see ourselves or as we ought to come to see, if not ourself, then the others.

Betancourt, a prisoner, found inner strength that was not autochthonous even if we cannot name it and have no grounds to name it "inner".  Its beginnings were not inner, they were without and are lost in our pre-history and in our pre-species, if you will.

We indulge Richard Hughes with his attribution of amusing ontological considerations to young Emily in his fanciful tale.  But down below the children are calling to her and her own thoughts go to the problem of Margaret.

Dilthey, Weber, Marcel or Jaspers would be at home with Hughes tale - but I think not Heidegger, for it could not be cast as more than fantasy and surely not as great, memorable Dichtung.  It is of course a flawed tale which we might be tempted to correct, or even to cease reprinting: his particulars in his portrayal of the abduction of children may now offend the facts of both piracy and child abductions as we know them - and of history, class and race in Jamaica.

Of course, there is no need to make Heidegger a "bogey-man" of the east Java seas - in the "dum-mie" of Hughes' Caribbean tale we may even hear the "dym", "duk" and "dusha" of a Russian tale, a Viking tale - a scholar might advise us.  But where are the children in the Heidegger opera?  Were there a Heideggerian variant of the Hughes' tale, would the practice of navigation at sea be illumined (flat geocentric, practical but also theoretical in so many respects) by the practical Heideggerian, schooled in anti-theory, anti-science, anti-mathesis (see Walcott, Omeros) - the hiker carries no sextant.

Regardless, it may be worth remembering the other thoughtful work about the self and others being written in and around 1928 and also published in that brief, decisive period of 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics', 'Being and Time' and 'The Essence of Reasons'.  For anyone having been up in the air, it may be a matter of coming to ground.

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]