Husserl Wollheim electron object art

Philosophy TA : Husserl on EIDOS; sceptical student might consider 'electron' post-chromodynamics. ; not as concept ! Individuals ??

See also: Wollheim 68/71 on art objects

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.

---

 

On variable stars and the rationality of theories

It is not yet 5 a.m. under a clear dark sky and I have made the decision to write this note rather than to do some star-gazing ( I have one of Al Nagler's "Televue Ranger" at my disposal here with a few of his lenses well-suited to it.)

I would like to defend the thesis that the extinguishing of intelligent life on the only planet with such intelligence in the only galaxy with such life forms would result in the demise of Cepheid variables as instances of a type but not variable stars as instances of a type. Nor would it have the consequence that there had, in fact, never been Cepheid variables. What is not clear to me is how to defend the claim that those variable stars would remain a suitable means to measure intergalactic distances in light-years or in AU ( astronomical units ) or in parsecs.

The need to defend the Hubble metric stars is in the interest of a far more important claim, to wit, that the quasars remain whatever they are or were, that magnetars remain a poor location for the re-emergence of intelligent life forms and that dark energy remains whatever it is.

The anecdotal side of this is my reading of the poetry of Alain Grandbois. His "étoiles" were not the stars of Galileo in much the same sense that Heidegger was arguing about with Husserl at about the same time and which was later repeated by Arendt late in her book, "The Human Condition".

Husserl began in astronomy, but by the time of Hubble's discoveries, Heidegger had him convinced that the Galilean viewpoint somehow perverted our relation to the heavens above ... perhaps not during daylight hours or when under heavy cloud, but certainly during clear moonless nights.

Not too long after Husserl's death, a Black Brandt rocket was sent aloft to determine a direction of a stellar x-ray source. Consider the possibility that this experiment and subsequent orbital parallax studies had revealed an unstable near-by star, that, say, Antares were in fact smaller than Betelgeuse and closer than Sirius. Suppose, further, that we were able to surmise that a minor cosmic event, a routine supernova, was about to wipe out this small home planet of intelligent life but that unbeknownst to us, it would also be wiping out not only the only such life in this galaxy, but also such life in any galaxy including any location since the Big Bang itself and, further, that due to a quirk of Dark Energy and cosmic expansion, that magnetars were about to become FAR more common, reducing any prospect for subsequent rational beings to evolve anywhere in this universe.

One motivation that I have for this line of musing is the thought that Strong AI has not brought philosophers to shift their view of theory makers closer to that of their view of computing machines, but rather it has helped to shift their view of us to one in which we are seen as closer to other mammalian species (specifically, cetacean and primate) and led us to puzzle over crows and octopi.

The theory of evolution and the new evidence for ubiquitous planets and a far higher number of brown dwarfs should motivate investigation by way of thought experiments as to why solving puzzles about ones more global, as-it-were, "wide" environment, suggests the rationality of theorizing for problem-solving beings.

The Japanese, prior to enforced contact with the Western powers, were content with their "River of Stars". Fording rivers in flood and bridging rivers were both major concerns in Japan, as was boating uneventfully across rivers. The star-river, our Milky Way, the "galaxy" of the Greeks, is a trope of sorts in a great deal of extant Japanese poetry. Given to poetry competitions, the Japanese thinker was not without problems to solve concerning the mention of stars in either linked verse or witty verse. Rules abound and these rules themselves made the tasks of poesis problematic.  Each time the practice became merely formulaic, something of a revolution occurred, and the very possibilities of the poetic praxis were re-thought through the emergence of a new poetic product, the last cycle, perhaps, having been that of the haiku of Shiki.

In my own work as a writer, I am beset with a scenario in which a cloud-bedecked planet is inhabited by those who do not know why sometimes the normally red fundament above glows strangely orange and why they perish of such truly horrible diseases although there are myths of happier ends in former times. These beings, we would say, would be inhabiting a planet in orbit about a centre of mass in common with a nearby red dwarf that, in turn, is in an orbital dance with a very unstable red giant that is about to shed its first outer layers in what we know to be a very common pattern in this universe.

[ to be continued ]

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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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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.

Curl markup for philosophy: text annotations and translations

Over at aule-browser.blogspot.com I have a post with a link to a philosphy text example.

What I hoped to make clear is that at each of the web page views for which there are links at each page (starting at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm) is that it is the identical text artifact that is being loaded into each page - a simple "include" macro is present: {include "truth_text.scurl"} which file is just text with MIT Curl markup such as {mbold some-technical-term} which is my bold variant on the usual Curl {bold some-text} text format.

When I don't want to see my bold emphasis in a text, I load that same file but into a top-level Curl page in which the definition of {mbold } is to just return the bracketed text as-is, i.e., with no emphasis added.

I am preparing another page with variant text from key portions of "Logical Investigations II" with translation comparisons.  I'll add a post when that is available at aule-browser.com

I have two pending notes at philpapers.org on this approach to philosophy eText/eBook as an alternative to HTML and PDF.

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]

Galileo and the philosophers: notes

Two philosophers with views of Galileo's achievement: Husserl and Lonergan.

An interesting story here is Koyré, first as student of Husserl and then as critical interlocutor.

Descartes on Galileo.

Celestial mechanics after 1805 (modernity) non-Euclidean geometry; statistical thermodynamics; Maxwell
Celestial mechanics after 1905 (Einstein et al)  Bohr,Hubble, cosmology, big bang, inflation, dark matter
Celestial mechanics after 2005 (Smolin et al) Gravity Probe B

Lonergan's ad hominem

Bernard Lonergan's "Insight - A Study of Human Understanding" appeared in 1958, too late to benefit from the first printing of "Mental Acts" by P.T. Geach in 1957.  Geach and Austin are the two principal links of the British philosophical community to that of Munich, Gottingen and Freiburg associated with phenomenology.  The link should have been through Russell, Goedel, Cantor and Hilbert - but it was not - perhaps due to Russell being paralyzed by his sessions listening to Wittgenstein.  The irony is that Russell had Wittgenstein rather as Husserl had Heidegger: both of the latter were to  be the triumph of the "everyday" over mathesis.

In Husserl's case, he may have himself to blame (although without consulting manuscripts it is not possible to say what comes from his shorthand and what from his assistants and later editors).  Consider this, from the "Crisis" volume, Section 53:
"the essence of the incipient philosophy of this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that ... [its] beginning course [...] is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naïve self-evidence"
This is almost a sketch of Sartre at work after his ever so brief apprenticeship.

But then consider Lonergan's project - not on Intuition (Anschauung), but Insight (Einsicht).  Husserl repeatedly resorted to ad hominem in dismissing scholastic disputations à la Thomas in spite of his debt to Brentano.  Had Lonergan read these, one might understand his ready dismissal of Husserl regardless of Husserl's status with the mathematical community at Göttingen. Here is Lonergan's insight:
"In brief, phenomenology is a highly purified empiricism. and it did not take long for it to topple over into an existentialism that describes, not the abstract possibility of description, but men as they are."[p. 415]

There are fascinating threads in Lonergan and Husserl on the immanent and on judgment and on reason - but Lonergan's possible ignorance of the direction of Reinach and Ingarden make this difficult to pursue with much sympathy.  In this regard, Geach could be the corrective.  Both Geach and Husserl reject the destination reached by Hume and for very similar reasons.  But to do justice to Lonergan is so very difficult due to how clear it is that his ultimate concern is to preclude a heresy concerning "immanent" ( a concern that can also be seen in some conservative political insights, for example, in Voegelin), the rational within man in his likeness to the one true God and sin in the fallen world.

There is a parallel in Husserl's rhetoric concerning science and infinite approximations - in the Krisis Husserl's provides a caricature of Galileo in spite of his express intent:  Galileo is forced to serve his purposes contra Hume.  The Krisis has no mention of Hermann Weyl, whose Zeit, Raum u. Materie had already gone through 5 editions between 1918 and 1922 (Husserl left Göttingen in 1916 to assume Rickert's chair in Freiburg.)  Perhaps Husserl did not think he could assume familiarity with his mathematical background or the physics of the day - and it may have further impeded his pulling a definitive text together (see MacIntyre on Edith Stein's observations) - as it was, Erfahrung u. Urteil (Experience and Judgment) was pulled together by his students in the year after his death - but their work was cut short in 1939 and may even have been over-hasty.

A persistent worry is that Husserl's bogeyman of "empiricist psychology" is comparable to Charles Taylor's "behaviourist psychology" and in this regard Lonergan is of interest in his view of how one limited view can very naturally inspire its own equally limited inversion.  The key difference is that Husserl was a "foundationalist" with regard to Logic, Mathematics and Exact Philosophy (with regard to which, see the volume reassessing the work of the young Rudolph Carnap.)  Nothing in Husserl should undermine formal foundations for linguistics anymore than anything in Geach.  Both could provide a corrective to a naive empiricism at various points.  The deeper concern is revealed in Heidegger, where the price exacted is a disregard for linguistic niceties, for mere factual linguistic truths.

I have not looked through the latest re-edition of Geach Mental Acts (mine dates to 1971) to know if he removed his mentions of "the brutes" - or, in my reading, the "les abrutis".  Something similar can be read in Lonergan, who goes so far as to refer to "the very stupid".  Lonergan's target is "mere apprehension" and the tension with the pre-given of Husserl is quite immediate (no pun intended.)  I imagine a follower of Geach issuing a revised version with a chapter on the seeming insight of pigs, corvids, dolphins, elephants, octopuses, apes and perhaps even a parrot.  Pigs are the real challenge: it is hard to imagine anything more apt to offend in Rome than any consideration of whether something approximating "judgment" could evolve in a troupe of pigs in the wild.  But note how pigs in the wild are treated with so much more respect by their hunting adversaries ...

Missing in Husserl is a profitable confrontation with that other Thomas, Thomas Reid.  Had Reinach survived, we might have had just such a textual dialog or at least a dialectical tangle.

It often seems to me that Taylor takes some combination of Habermas-Gadamer to have provided a corrective to Heidegger - but Taylor's student readers find no repudiation of Heidegger - quite the opposite.  Heidegger remains there only to be pardoned as memory fades.  My corrective: that in November 1938 each Mesusah be restored to each preserved house in Marburg where Jews lived in 1927.  Taylor avoids these issues of Heidegger's abandonment of Husserl's concern with reason and judgment - all that he takes from Jaspers - or acknowledges - is the phrase "axial age".  Hans Jonas passes without mention, his sin being more difficult to pardon.

The attack on scientific psychology in Husserl is not based on "insight" - but the flanking attack on "modernity" and the "science of the Enlightenment" found in Taylor has its ground in Husserl's own attack on naturalism in science - not autobiographically, but in terms of its ready recognition by young readers.  Husserl's own remarks on technology serve that project ( Galileo's great practical contribution was to ensure the greatest range for artillery in war - perhaps one of the most immoral practices of warfare and yet now accepted as truly the most natural - his telescope was a great boon to artillery - only the calculus became more significant - and in our day, computing comes to us directly from naval gunnery.)

But at what price such insight?  It is not the "experience" of war to which we turn, but our "judgment" of what can be just in confrontations with utter violence and unbridled force.  Consider our ready use of "the brutes" in our practice of warfare - even preventive, in the use of rats and monkeys to clear minefields - pigs are too heavy and the loss of dogs too traumatic for their handlers.  And what of courage in the face of impending death on a battlefield bereft of fairness, respect or any consideration of a common humanity?

For Husserl prior to the loss of his son in war, the fundamental was undeniably mathematics.  Years later the entire project of mathesis is brought into question and the fundamental concern becomes the origin of possible and realized true and adequate judgments.  The usual ad hominem is that this transition occurs along a trail of failures where Husserl appears as something of a "last Mohican" as the frontier vanishes - vanishes not in the face of an endless reach of deforested lands, unmechanized farms and muddy towns, but in the face of impending total war.

To return to Husserl's project at a time when a concerted attack on science is underway - an attack proceeding a several fronts - an attack against which philosophers embracing substance dualism will provide no serious obstacle - an attack which while enshrining the soul is utterly inimical to insight, science, knowledge and fruitful debate regarding mind, respect and values.  The attack proceeds by an appeal to recall the maligned merits of a battered tradition.  It is best confronted with its own failure to engender science and to provide a defensible theory of experience and judgment in the light of that science.  The tradition which cannot allow that pigs have souls cannot be - must not be - the one we embrace.

Husserl's phenomenology and the unusual: notes

Trần Đức Thảo may be one of the more unusual philosophers to have studied Husserl prior to the publication of Sartre's "inspired" L'Être et le Néant « essai d'ontologie phénoménologique » in 1943.  In that year the Vietnamese philosopher completed his studies under Merleau-Ponty, but only after a visit to Leuven and some access to Husserl materials there (at the urging of M. M-P.)

Other unusual employments of phenomenology, such as a slight vogue in the theory of architecture, tend to come from readings of Heidegger and Heideggerians.

Another unusual use is that available at allacademic.com in a paper on Fanon.  That paper proposes that

[a]n existential reduction unites Husserl’s classical transcendental phenomenological reduction and Heidegger’s and Sartre’s emphasis on the more existential dimension of phenomenology

and that its application can serve to achieve "complete liberation", i.e., psychological freedom once violence has "won" physical freedom.  Correctives to Fanon are not likely to be effective, as his followers tend to be unconditional or "true" believers.  The most serious problem of course stems from the historical and anthropological evidence that slavery within the African continent was not based on "race" - where race is naively viewed as skin pigmentation or black/white - nor were empires and subjegation of peoples new to Africa prior to contact with Europeans.  The current view that all humankind either remained in or migrated from Africa undermines a good deal of Fanon's polemics and his rhetoric.  Consideration of subjugation of the non-believers by the followers of the one true prophet  also undermines his case.  Fanon is a touchstone for those who want a justification for violence to remedy systemic injustice - injustice sustained and advanced by the very structures linguistic and otherwise of a culture, a society, a religion, a language or a tradition.  These doctrines of the true nature of imperialism, colonialism, oppression, poverty, rape and genocide are likely imprevious to mere phenomenology of a Husserlian bent - whether realist or idealist, early or late.

Trần Đức Thảo is a more interesting case: linguistic research is indicating a close connection between the "pronominal" and the "copular" in the evolution of forms of the so-called "to-be" verb across very diverse languages -especially in terms of the "grammaticalization" of topic and aspect. [...]

Fanon and Trần Đức Thảo were both radicalized by their experiences with French abuses of power and gross injustice in time of war and the creation of pretexts for war.  Continued French chauvinism no doubt contributes to the appeal of radical formulations to French dissidents in France and dissidents within French post-colonial territories.  The case in French west Africa is rather more complicated as many of those tribes and nations have not addressed their past histories in slave trading and the continued toleration of slavery, indentured labor and ethnic subjugation - especially in Moslem nations.

Reconciliation, as in the case of Canada and its appalling history of abuses in church-based residential schools for aboriginal children may indicate that the first phase need not always be violent.  A recent conversation with a young artist from the Red Lake Minnesota reserve reminded me of how important that second phase will be: my one modest proposal for reappropriating aboriginal skies can be seen at remastr.aule-browser.com

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.
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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.
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« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
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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

ad hominem and the author

Whether philosophical anthropology is a subject matter or not, imagine for a moment that it forms a series of three courses, each for one of the last three years of a four-year degree.
I will suppose that one of those course will treat of "existence" and will have to address itself to the writings of "existentialists". Suppose that my tone in my own lectures is mocking.  How might I proceed?
I would almost certainly begin with the curious exchange between Bryan McGee and Iris Murdoch in which both seem to share the assessment that La Nausée by J-P Sartre is a great novel.  Matters could only be worse if they had gone on the agree that "L'Etranger" by Camus is even finer.
Camus was not a philosopher, but the course must consider those writers within the western tradition who have insight into the human condition (in truth we publish the book's title and author on the course list to ensure enrollment - departmental budgets are no trivial matter.)  Consider the book as a novel, not as a treatise or an assemblage of essays.  A Frenchman murders an Arab.  The French reader was aware that had Merseault been a somebody, a few thousand francs (or less?) to the victim's family and the whole matter could have been looked after - unless there were some political angle.
I encountered the book in two settings: first in a course on existentialism and then in a course in reading French.  The latter was the more useful, as the message for the philosophy student was of no interest - only the obvious flaws of the novel.  Change the setting such that a Russian kills an Estonian on a Baltic beach, or an Israeli kills a Palestinian on the West Bank or a Libyan diplomat murders a Turkish servant in Berlin - and the book (or in our day, a film based on the book) requires that we we know the life of that victim, how he came to be there that day, did he have brothers, was his father still living. what was his view of the French Empire (or Union or whatever face Paris was putting on their possessions.)
Were you to learn from an unpublished letter that some man born in Oran was obviously a racist, small-minded bigot, you might not purchase the letter (say you find it in a cardboard box in some shop.)  If a scholar found the letter and authenticated it as Camus writing to fellow writer X, we have publishing paydirt.
In the case of Camus' novel, it helps to read it in French and to discuss it with someone with some feel for character and its place in the moral evaluation or assessment of a novel.
In the case of Sartre's effort, it is essential to read La Nausée  in the original if you are to assess the book if only to be struck by the tasteless puns that litter the novel.  It is also essential to ask why it ends with an incident of sexual depravity in a library.  Why for all the attention to the root of a tree, there is nothing on the manner in which the root of the protagonist interacted with his partner in sex.  The root is seen in the library.
The entire effect is remarkably juvenile.  The only satisfaction for the reader is that Roquentin's time in a camp will be Sartre's (short) time in a camp.  That Sartre was a complete and utter scoundrel is something the reader simply must know.  Why?
Consider anonymity.  Personally, I wish to see anonymity established in natural science technical journals.  I wish to see the UN sponsor a research registry that is simply a science registry: you would not be published in a journal  even as EC1905uv-CHEM but as A3456gt (Feynman, for one, was well aware of what happens when a physicist ventures into biology - even physicists mock mathematicians and vice-versa - the word "mere" and "just" and "only" are essential to their gossip, banter and inuendo.)  Philosophers are worse: "She has only published one article - in philosophy of literature - and she has this thing about Simone Weil ..."
Tenure and promotion hang on publishing.  So, in the case of science, the registry would emit a rating.  Appeal it to an anonymous committee if you must (there would still be some abuses - students of X will still get more jobs, better jobs, than students of Y,etc - life is never fair nor expected to be so.)
Peer-reviewed may not suffice.  In literature, writers have demonstrated that they can submit their own best-seller years later to their own publisher under another title and with a pseudonym and only to have the publisher's reader reject it.

It is inconceivable that String Theory would have gotten so far in our day without the name of Gell-Mann.  Hidden variable theory got so far because some advocates were known by name as associates of Einstein.

Suppose you don't believe this.  Enter a bookstore and see a book, "I Did It" by Fred Smith.  Knowing that a legal loop-hole is allowing the royalties to go to a known murderer of another name, would you buy that book or woudl you instead by another thriller for the train trip to your conference?  Do you want to risk being seen reading THAT book when you have not yet received tenure or your first promotion?  (If you hope for tenure, pay attention even to the books -even the number of books, neither too many nor too few  on your office shelves.)
There are books that, ceteris paribus, we might borrow from a library but we would not purchase new unless remaindered.  If you are not that reader, I lost you a ways back, so I continue.

I recall reading some years ago that it was striking how little de Beauvoir had to say of interest of some of the remarkable people she met through her association with Sartre.  If you are a female reader, I risk now having lost you.  Let's switch to Iris Murdoch.

In her major work, Murdoch sees fit to link Husserl to his followers - but only to those who abandoned his project.  Roman Ingarden is missing.  Only Husserl in one phase is presented.  But then she chooses, having first introduced a humourous comment about Zen, to tie Husserl to a Zen reading of his project (curiously, she may have been unaware of Heidegger's Japanese student.)
Husserl was a regular interlocutor with Cantor in Halle.  Husserl was then a Goettingen.  Later he took Rickert's position at Freiburg.  Unlike Russell, he lost a son to war and he would lose all to Heidegger and the Nazis and die before seeing their defeat.  All irrelevant.  Start again.  Husserl's concern was with mathematics and foundations.  This is completely missing in the thoughtful chapter by Murdoch.  The chapter - the book - is very much worth reading.  Read carelessly, we see that Hegel begets Marx.  But somehow Husserl fails to have the importance of Wittgenstein.  Not that he is neglected by the author as is Ayer, Ryle and Russell (to see Ryle in psychoanalysis, read Roy Schafer, "A New Language for Psychoanalysis" and compare his early work on "internalization" - a strange affair of which Murdoch was perhaps unaware.)

Why is Husserl not worth the attention of Frege?  How could a man with no morals, Heidegger, garner such continued attention?

Consider the failure of Heidegger to write one word of Edith Stein to his Hannah Stern.
Well, then don't.  Consider this: we are finally getting back to Schopenhauer in the Anglo-American world of philosophy. In the German text, the idea of "family resemblance" is right there on the page, literally.  Why had the attendees of Wittgenstein's afternoons not read their Schopenhauer?  Terror of the master?  One cutting word from LW about Schopenhauer would do it, one supposes.
Walter Bieml, years later in a Heidegger seminar on Heraclitus, on a day when the master had the grippe, is recorded as saying, roughly, "Perhaps today, in the absence of the Professor, I might venture to say that .."

A philosopher tells his reader, not his technical colleague, but his intelligent reader, that you cannot enter a public building from an open square without also "entering a cathedral".  Follow me: the author is an unbelieving Jew whose grandparents had all converted but whose parents practiced no religion.  Variant: the author is named Mackenzie.  Variant: the author has converted from Methodist to Roman Catholic.  Variant: the author no longer attends a mosque.  Or: the author is an avowed atheist who never has a religion.  Or: the author is an atheist who had been raised a High Church Anglican.
It may help to know that the the early Christians thought of themselves as Jews without temples.  It may not. What about the insight: I remember entering a reknowned basilica after a day of cycling through summer farmlands and the near over-whelming frisson when gazing up in the dim and the chill of the nave.  In that moment I might even have undergone a conversion.  I do believe that it happens that the first large ceiling that I ever saw above me was indeed a church ceiling, but the first "Great Building" that I ever saw was seem from great distance across the prairie by the plume of black smoke rising from its unseen pinnacle, the great Bessborough, the Saskatoon railroad hotel (although now no railroad entered it below).  Had I first seen the great Banff Springs Hotel (my father saw it in the Bow Valley before he ever laid eyes on the Bess', but he already knew the MacDonald from his boyhood in Edmonton.  Unlike my first trip to the Bow Valley, he was there in knickers and later in a suit.  He vacationed in vacation dress.  His mother was English, his father a businessman - and an American at that.
The first building known by some of my mother's ancestors was a wigwam.  A wigwam is not a teepee.
What insight of my own might be elided if I follow the vision of the writer, every great public building, a cathedral, incomprehensible without the cathedral, the bishops's seat, where declarations were made such as that which would take Edith Stein to Auschwitz in reprisal.
When a piece of writing is not presenting an argument, say one found on a sheet of paper in a shop - consider this novel line of argument, author unknown, could anything be less appropriate than ad hominem?  It may depend on the premises I am asked to accept as true, the assumptions that appear to be required, but also the terms, the rhetoric, in which the matter is posed.
Take the case today of theists presenting the scientific case for the religious brain and the evolution of religion as the integument of culture and social structure and societal relations if not language itself.
Take the case of a writer child psychologist, appealing for consideration of mind, consciousness, self-awareness, character, courage in assessing the normal versus abnormal development of children.  And then we learn that he was an abuser at his charity institution.
Someone tells you that Adolf H*tler loved animals.  That he was neurologically afflicted.  This may hold no interest for you at all.
But someone proposes that our study of language acquisition in the bonobo be conducted by an autistic animal trainer who does not touch fur and is almost mono-syllabic, has no pets, and no "liking" for animals.  Now we may have an asset.  Now we can mask the animal detecting that we too, as trainers, have feeling, like the little fellow, find him amusing, endearing, are glad to see him this morning.
Think what a discovery if we learned from a letter than Stanley Milgram wept each night over the plight of those in his experiments, that M*ng*l* whipped himself each night with a belt and prayed for forgiveness, that Harry Harlow had buried each little monkey in its own grave, visited them each year, pausing for a moment before each.
I confess, I am unaffected by the report that Derrida was in the habit of praying.  I am too much aware of the man with whom he enjoyed conversing.  I cannot imagine what could endear Derrida to me, make me reconsider the value of what is written in that slim PUF volume in its endearing cover, gold yellow, rough pages, carried about now for years from one city to another.
In a similar vein I am unable to take Habermas seriously having never been able to take seriously a single lecturer who embraced him.
I remember my vexation when a philosopher of note addressed an international conference on history and logic of science to say of hermeneutics that interpretation is a game that anyone can play.
First: not a game.  Second, no, not anyone.  Third, this is not "mere" interpretation.  Even without a knock-down argument, a given reading of human life may be inadequate or unsatisfactory or otherwise incomplete on many grounds, if only a hunch.
But when the hunch we choose to follow is a hunch expressed in writing by an author we come to know as utterly disingenuous, a prevaricator, a liar, a traitor, a poseur or simply a person devoid of conscience we can politely say, "Sorry, she/he (or their book) simply doesn't interest me, failed to hold my interest..."  If there is an interlocutor who responds with "But I think that what X is trying to say is that ..." now we reach the author's intention, imputing a good motive, an effort to be understood, we are asked to be just, fair.  And with Samuel Beckett, I am always more than fair, and will ignore verse after verse until some one short verse catches hold of me.  I would have to learn something truly hateful about Lawrence Durrell before I would cease to suggest his poetry - long after I have seased to recommend his first Quartet.
A man with a nasty reputation but given to good causes, reported to his readers his shock at learning that Frege was an anti-Semite.  If I believe that a word from Frege was enough for Russell to have been deterred from visiting him to discuss propositional functions with him in Goettingen, at the university built as an alternative to building a prison, the home of Gauss, Hilbert - a doubt or suspicion is planted.  Some writers must be above reproach just as a Pope must be above reproach, an Irish Catholic Bishop above reproach, a Rector of Heidelberg University above reproach.  Any such reporach could be considered ad hominen, but in these special cases is excused.
And what of the Gifford Lectures?  Or a Pulitzer Prize?  Or the Nobel which may have been denied to Hoyle and Gamow?  Must the Vietnamese wait a century to learn about the fate of Ho's wife?
Eliade wanted us to understand his actions in Romania as mere youthful indiscretions.  Frankly I cannot read a writer today on the "sacred" in the "modern" age without hearing boots on paving stones.
I cannot read an attack on "technology" without seeing the marvelous inventions of Arthur Ganson.
Nothing in man's essence destined him to fly, but once airborne, who failed to denouce the "heros" who would drop bombs from aircraft?  The courageous pilots!
An old friend, a neighbor, lies on his deathbed in a hospice - at Seymour Johnson he taught barnstormers to find a homing beacon before they were sent off to Europe.  I reproached him for his habitual remarks about Jews.  He lived a short walk from what had been the Jewish golf course.  But he wrote no book, never stood for public office.  He always apologized, I always forgave.  His faults were not those of a Norm Coleman or a Michelle Bachmann, politicians here in our towns, our state,  who could never have my vote.  Leave politics, and I would accept them as neighbors, try to be just, try to forgive their faults, try to speak plainly but not too harshly. Even buy their autobiography - but only as a neighbor.
PS
In her remarks on "sees" in the same section, Murdoch appears unaware that the root for a "kind" in Russian is the same as the root for "to see" as in the Greek, video, VID, in Russian.  It is a shame that Russian must not have been one of her languages and perhaps not even taught at her college in her day. Yet it is closer to English than is, say Hungarian to its cousin, Finnish.  English, French and German - barely two languages from the diachronic standpoint, barely two from a synchronic standpoint if you instead consider English, French and Dutch.  Imagine if the Danes had never been in England, not Jutes and Angles but only Frisians and Dutch before the Normans ... and you may grasp how silly that we count those as "foreign" languages. Contrary to this view, Ricoeur on "recognition" in English, French and German.

"petites personnes", suspicion and distrust

The many readers of "Herzog" were not mere nobodies in the literary career of Saul Bellow.

Eliade, Ricoeur and Taylor. The latter, the Canadian philosopher, finds himself referenced in the Vienna lectures on recognition, but somehow a credit to Gabriel Marcel on the gift is missing.

Marcel converted, but I am not aware of a note by Ricoeur on his remaining a Protestant and his distance from the Catholic Church (so very different for the Anglicans or American Lutherans and Episcopalians.)

Les Fonds Ricoeur, in an official response to Robert Lévy, offer us des petites personnes and their preoccupations, I suppose.

In France, Ricoeur came to be recognized - the fulfillment of his career, his professional life. In America, he was at none other than U. Chicago.

I cannot help wondering if he may have seen the flawed Russian film, "The Return", prior to his lectures in Vienna on recognition.

Consider these nobodies. Some remain without any distinguishable religious beliefs but remain uncomfortable when it is announced that there will be a new assessment by eminent scientists of what behavior (not behaviour) distinguishes our own species from earlier primates and hominids.

Eliade was required reading in so many colleges, required by professors who were certain that there is always the need for faith.

Taylor is so crass as to toy with his readers: "Is that all there is?"

I wonder about capable scientists and judges whose careers meet with no acclaim: a few publications and few  judgments over-turned on appeal and those appeals upheld.

In one collection of Taylor's essays in technical philosophy, a "grey essay" appears: an unpublished "paper".  It is now common to create posthumous "Collected Works" in which each and every scrap finds its place in the master's legacy.  But the fate of the "grey papers" of Ricoeur?

Ricoeur's own turn of phrase in the English translation seems most apt for Taylor: "the rhapsody of ideas".  Eliade will eventually be placed with Arendt, a "writer" and not a "researcher" and a writer with an agenda.

Against the lot, I prefer Milosz responding, if you will, to Raja Rao, or Avishai Margalit's "argument" against what has no spiritual reality for him.  Milosz has his contradictions, Margalit his modesty.

But then there is Jaspers and his letters to Arendt.  Jaspers is in Luxembourg, already stripped of academic office, under a publishing ban, and he does not manage to get his wife, a Jew, to Switzerland.  Yet he will take exception to post-war legislation and exile himself to Basel.  With Husserl stripped, Jaspers stripped, Ricoeur heads off for a summer of '39 in Munich.

The little people, the mere readers, are to follow Ricoeur in his meanderings, in his distrust of science.  We could ignore Sartre, who knowingly took the philosophy teaching post of a sacked Jew, from whom there is almost nothing to be learned.  Almost nothing.

Then there are the elderly readers: new publishers spring up in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, publishing Festschrift and more, plump with a nostalgia for their old days in the DDR, all their plays produced, all their books in the schools, summer cottages, travel abroad.  We may have lingering hopes of transcendence, they had literature, quoting Northrop Frye and Marx and Stalin and never a mention of the Stasi.  No, "I regret having informed on your son, having over-heard him talking in his room to his friends when I was a guest in your home."  For that we have "The Lives of Others".

Ricoeur's lectures close with a false opposition of Levinas-Husserl.  There is a gap. The between.  The attentive reader knows that it is bridged for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Catholic, Protestant.

The real attack on science and technology is, I believe, actually an attack on science and history.  "Teknik" is a smokescreen, not unlike Leiss on "domination".  After a lifetime devoted to "lived experience" and "co-constitution", all that I have left is a confidence in poesis and a willingness to continue to read.  And a growing measure of disgust.

But there is also validation, when the reader recognizes in the learned author the same longing, the same nostalgia for the transcendent.  At that point the author must be trusted.

Missing from the Ricoeur narrative is the avowal of a past falsified, an apology to Gusdorf.  My only corrective is to re-read Beckett's "Murphy", Beckett having been a true hero of resistance.  Not just another liar, poseur, windbag.

The message of Ricoeur is that phenomenology will be of no avail.  I disagree.  We require now a phenomenology of combat, to understand how we came it embrace grapeshot, boiling tar, fragmentation grenades, landmines that only maim, machine guns.

One of the pioneers of powered flight could not bear that we would fly to murder.  Not kill in combat.  Murder.  The synchronization of machine gun with propeller was a major triumph.  Now we are faced with theocracies who are in pursuit of nuclear arms, an Islamic nation with nuclear arms which is only one step from theocracy.  A liar aims for the American Presidency and another liar occupies the highest effective office in the secular state of Turkey.  Turkey, whose armies were stopped at Vienna.

If we cannot embrace science and history without religion, ethics without religion, law without religion, then we may not be armed well enough to survive the collective slouch to reassuring fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is not some marginal deviation.  It is the core.

Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians would have us believe that we can have science and history and all the old certainty in the God who would watch a boy hang for a piece of bread, a girl buried alive. We can be reassured.  We must restore the strength of our institutions, ensure the soundness of our library collections, our curricula.

So far blind trust in a Bible-believing President has brought us only a war in Iraq after a botched effort against the Taliban. Distrust and suspicion was not enough to prevent a pointless war against an Iraqi dictator, a modest dictatorship when compared to North Korea, Cuba or China.  A war begun with remote-control missiles, cruise missiles.  A war that claims precision, but cannot perform an inventory of ammunition dumps (what could the rag-heads use artillery shells for anyway?)

When we read our political commentators for insight, when we try to form an opinion, we do go forward with a certain trust.  There is a rhetoric which ensures this trust.  To read the apologies for the old DDR and its writers and critics is a lesson I will not too soon forget.  And there is a rhetoric of the philosophers who write about "the really big questions" - especially those who seem to have no one answer, no system to offer us, such as Ricoeur, a Protestant, and Taylor, a Catholic.

With the doyen of American philosophers, Hilary Putnam, having made a complete tour of the positions available to him, the little people might be excused for believing that there is no progress in philosophy and that perhaps a theology which suits the President is not so disreputable after all.  Anthony Flew finds his God.  (it could be an effect of the aging brain and no President would confess a loss of faith.)  And we, the mere readers, are still waiting for even a small group of philosophers to emerge who are able to address those of us who are reluctant to concede that all and anything that separates us from the hominids before us is our brain anatomy and chemistry, our social relations of dominance and exchange, and behavior (linguistic and emotive.)

To read a philosopher and know him to have failed to address his greatest public failings (were the camps for Officers not public arenas with publishing? ) - to read that Gusdorf elided the profanity and obscenity that punctuates military speech - and then you have heard the man.  Ricoeur was sent to make amends at a school which had been exemplary during the war.  Knowing what we now know about the extent of French collaboration - knowing something of how very differently the Poles comported themselves - perhaps the University of Chicago needs to reflect on the buffoons and worse whom it has ensconced on occasion: beginning with Tillich, Arendt, Eliade, Ricoeur and now Taylor.

I was taught that what was different about the Kennedy administration is that he brought in brains from Chicago.  Now we have a taste of Chicago in the White House and a President, a lawyer, who may still consider a vague theology and disreputable sermons to be somehow more fundamental than science and history.

Einstein claimed that science cannot give you the taste of the soup.  In many ways he was wrong, as our new views of beaches, clouds and human feeling amply demonstrate.  Professors assure their students that philosophy is not about the meaning of life, but also guide their best students away from disciplines such as history and philosophy of history, literature and philosophy of literature risking that those fields can tolerate mediocre efforts with little harm.

Major universities use their endowments to help ensure that work that is deserving of publication is published and often that every notebook and every set of lecture notes appears in bound collected works.  Most of us will only see the volumes that were aimed at the intelligent reader, the discerning reader (although the need to translate German and French texts for English markets might lead you to wonder how serious those readers are thought to be, unilingual, under-educated or merely language-challenged.)

Translations of lectures by a philosopher, published by a university press, suggest that this work merits reading.  With few books of philosophy finding their way into American public libraries, my copy of The Course of Recognition from hclib.org might yet be replaced by Le Parcours from a participating inter-library loan institution.  I wonder: were these lectures a strange avowal of his personal need and of his feeling of being threatened given what befell Eliade?  Did he see himself in a portrayal by Bellow?  Had his wife died without knowing why a Croix de Guerre with such connections had been consigned to resume teaching in a backwater?  Had we known, would there have been an interdiction?  Should there have been?

My own suspicion is that Ricoeur had read pre-war writing of Jaspers that were easily misread.  Mikel Dufrenne is gone, Gusdorf is gone, and so we, mere readers, not scholars, may never have an answer.  On the shelf behind, first to hand, the books of Paul Ricoeur.  Books on almost everything ever dear to me.  Husserl.  Metaphor.  Narrative.  Freud.  Books in which the author's best hunch, his hard-earned insight, his daring direction, are essential to the reader and his reading and what he shapes from this reading in his very own speech and thought and musings.  In what he advises his children, his friends.  Imperfect.  Flawed.  But not "essentially" flawed?

In these writers there can be no separation of the writer from his work.  This is not science, this is not history, this is not mathematics.  They do not offer an argument, a line of argument, from which you might divorce them, abstract them.  They are in the lineage of Lessing, Nietzsche and Heidegger - they must themselves be read - and any unadvised reader will be hostage to the translator.

If we were to discover evidence that Jeshua, the Nazarene, a stone-cutter, had left behind a wife somewhere along the Ganges, the wife who taught him to speak and ensured more work for him, his father, his brothers, would that, could that, now be irrelevant?  If the Vietnamese on the Chinese wife of Ho are any indication, it is not so.  This would not be youthful indiscretion.  Behold the man.