two photos

The one with Meillassoux from the ENS (taken, oddly, from Latour’s iPhone) was posted on the previous blog in January, but I had never seen the other LSE photo with Latour and Edgar Whitley.

That’s the “Amsterdam sweater” in both photos. Due to Cairo’s climate I literally no longer owned a sweater as of August 2007, but Amsterdam made me buy another.

Bultmann on the young Gadamer

March 7, 1929. Bultmann (in Marburg) writes to Heidegger (in Freiburg):

“Gadamer’s Habilitation lecture recently took place. It consisted essentially in a repetition of the Aristotelian analysis of philia. It was not very skillful, but it was subtle. I didn’t have the impression of a productive head, but did have the thorough impression that the listeners could learn something from him.”

Heidegger responds in the next letter that he expects Gerhard Krüger to amount to more than Gadamer. (Incidentally, it’s a letter written the day after Husserl’s 70th birthday, reporting on the Festschrift for Husserl that included Heidegger’s important “Vom Wesen des Grundes.”) [ADDENDUM: It’s also the letter where he reports to Bultmann about the famous Davos Disputation, where Heidegger debated Kant with Ernst Cassirer.]

I don’t cite the letter as a stab at Gadamer (I have nothing against him), but in part to show that Heidegger missed something in him. Sure, there’s a touch of pedantry about Gadamer, but he still has a bit of the philosophical Geist. From reading the big Gadamer biography, I had more than ever the sense that Heidegger didn’t think especially highly of him, and that Gadamer sensitively noticed this and suffered from it for many years. And it’s remarkable how old he was when he finally published Truth and Method.

Heidegger had a certain tendency to make his students feel very unsure of themselves, and I think that’s a very bad trait for a teacher to have. In the first incarnation of the blog, I contrasted the “Heidegger type” professor with the “Brentano type.” The difference should be obvious… Brentano on the surface may have been even tougher on his students, yet despite leaving their master feeling a bit wounded by him in some cases, they generally felt sure enough of themselves that they were capable of rebelliously loyal work within and beyond Brentano’s horizon.

can’t resist posting it after all

Yeah, this is the sort of thing I mean. It looks like that food may be called simit.

That’s also the exact same view I was speaking of in the last post, though it doesn’t look as nice on video as in real life.

Istanbul layover

One of the nice little perks of the already nice trip to Croatia are the two longish layovers in Istanbul.

I adore Istanbul. My “favorite city in the world” designation tends to shift every few years, but Istanbul has been in first place for almost three years, since a memorable 2006 layover en route to Bulgaria. (It wasn’t my first time there, but somehow it impressed me even more that time than previously.)

On the previous incarnation of this blog, I covered the reasons, but they are probably somewhat as follows…

*Water. I love cities on the water. (The Nile really doesn’t count, grand though it is at night. I’m talking about big, open bodies of water. Maybe it’s because I never saw actual ocean until age 16.)

*I’m generally quite comfortable in an Islamic environment, for a number of reasons.

*Istanbul is exotic enough to be endlessly fascinating, but still perfectly functional, unlike many exotic places.

*lots of important history to the city, obviously.

*I also love seagulls, and the gulls in Istanbul are both brazen and basically friendly. I won’t post that “seagull swarm” YouTube video again, but that always happens to me there as well, and it’s hard not to have a childlike fascination with them. My favorite thing in Istanbul, in fact, is when the ferry boat builds up to high speed, people start tossing chunks of those circular pretzel-things that they eat in Istanbul (not sure what they’re called) and the seagulls take such pleasure in trying to catch the chunks of pretzel without changing speed or trajectory, just by angling their heads a bit. In fact, they enjoy the interaction so much that they ignore the ones that they miss, and wait for you to throw them another piece.

And yes, the ferry boats are maybe too obvious to mention, but there are many of them, leaving often. Usually during layovers there I’ll just get on boats at random and go wherever they’re going, and figure out later how to get back. The view of the Sultanahmet district from the water is nearly unparalleled anywhere in the world, of course.

Beirut has many of the same features just listed for Istanbul, and in fact Beirut is also very high on my list of favorite cities.

the most exhausting things

It’s been awhile since I felt this physically beaten down by a single day. 5 hours of hustling between offices, grafted onto a night with little sleep, is a good recipe for physical breakdown by 9 PM.

It makes me wonder, what are the most exhausting activities?

I exclude such obvious examples as triathlon endurance competitions or armed combat. One expects those to be exhausting. I’m speaking here instead about the sorts of activities where at the end of the day, you think “man, I’m completely devoid of any additional ounce of energy. What’s wrong with me?” And then after thinking of it for a few minutes, you realize it was an abnormal day.

Near the top of my list would be visits to art museums. You’re standing most of the time, but you’re also so interested in what you’re seeing that you don’t realize how absurdly tiring it is to stand for 3 or 4 hours at a time. And every time I go to an art museum, I forget what’s in store for me, and it happens yet again– I get home, feel physically wasted, wonder why, and then remember why.

With a day like today, I suspect that a pervasive sense of uncertainty increases the exhaustion. It’s one thing to put in a lot of effort, and quite another to put in a lot of effort while wondering if that effort is entirely futile. At almost every stage of today’s bureaucratic raft ride, I faced the genuine prospect of failure, and that generates a sort of faint background radiation of stress and hopelessness.

This reminds me of a thought I had about waiting… It’s actually not that hard to wait for something if you know that it will eventually come for sure. If I do a “phenomenological analysis” of my annoyance at a late bus, for instance, I find that at least in my own case, the annoyance has less to do with the lateness than with the prospect that the bus might never come at all.

If this is true more generally in the populace and not just of me (and I’m not sure about that) then it suggests that people will put up with many very bad things as long as you keep them fully informed of what the problem is and what steps are being taken to rectify it. But you’d better give it to them straight the first time, not sugar-coat the bad news. Either tell them the truth, or nothing.

I remember once I was on an Amtrak train going from Santa Fe to Chicago. In Trinidad, Colorado, the train stopped at the station and stayed there. After about 45 minutes we were told there would be a short delay. One incredibly fascistic conductor tried to tell us we couldn’t leave the train, because it might start moving any minute and it would be our own problem if we were left behind.

Finally, 4 or 5 of us ignored him and jumped out of the train, and walked to the station house. Turns out there had been a major derailment in Kansas, of a freight train carrying steel girders. I asked the station master if I’d be left behind if I went into central Trinidad for dinner for a couple of hours, and he laughed and said “no problem at all; it’s going to be awhile.”

In the end, I think the total delay was 14 hours. It’s always possible that the conductor on the train didn’t know the true story when he warned us not to leave, but I really had the sense he was just trying to be a control freak in keeping us on the train.

The story may sound a bit odd to Europeans, who are used to jumping on and off of trains with ease even at the briefest of stops. But entering an Amtrak train (and they are very comfortable) is somewhat like entering a space capsule. Most of the seats are very high above the ground, and there is a general feel of being quite cut off from the scenery outside the window, as compared with the low-sitting, windows-open European type.

the exact order of things

Some people wanted to know the exact process that took 5 hours. The stages went like this…

1. Go ask my laundry people if by chance they had found a passport in one of my shirt pockets while preparing the load. (This was my last hope.) The answer was no.

2. Walk to a passport photo place to have a set taken.

3. Taxi to the U.S. Embassy. Wait around 90 minutes until my number is called (that’s about average).

4. Luckily, the window clerk I dealt with was reasonable, if not overly warm. (There’s one guy who works there whom I’d love to throw water balloons at… He always says he doesn’t understand you the first three times you say something. And when he finally understands, does he do like a normal person would and reassuringly state “oh, now I get it.”? No. He just turns around in the middle of one of your sentences and walks away and acts on what you said. At least he does that much, I guess.

5. Yes, they told me, you can get an emergency 3-month passport for $100. (Good enough for me. I’ll get the real one in late July after the England trip.)

6. However, I need a police report showing that I reported it lost.

7. Went to the cashier to pay the fee, and waited a bit longer for the application to be processed and for them to call my name. Another competent and reasonable but un-warm person was the one who called me, but at an Embassy competent and reasonable is enough.

8. Walked outside, called the University support person, and asked her if I would be allowed to leave Egypt with a new passport having no entry stamp. The answer was no. I have to meet one of the University handlers tomorrow to walk me through the whole Immigration Ministry process (right after picking up the passport).

9. Took a taxi to Zamalek, to the one police station I remembered for sure. (In a bizarre November 2000 incident at this same station, a detective took off his pants in my presence, which I hope wasn’t à la “Lawrence of Arabia.” I remained calm, and after 2 or 3 minutes he put on a new pair of pants.)

10. Was told by a nice high-ranking Zamalek cop that this was more of a “government” station (not sure what that means, unless it means they deal with political stuff), and that I needed to go to Garden City (way back down by the Embassy!) to report the loss.

11. Went to the Garden City station. Had a very kind officer helping me there, sort of a young “eager beaver” type who seemed to really want to do a good job. He filled out the reports by hand. Then I had to pay a 1 Pound fee for the police report (that’s less than 20 American cents), and went to see the Captain on duty, a nice youngish officer who looked too nice to be smoking his requisite tough guy cigarette in his tough guy manner. It’ll look better when he’s 15 years older, maybe. But I have no complaints. He stamped the police report, which I will need both to get the new passport and the new visa at the Immigration Ministry. (Thank God a university employee will be helping me with that. These Ministries are Kafkaesque nightmares without native help.)

While I was waiting to have the report stamped, the nice young Captain with the tough guy cigarette was listening to a complaint from a middle-aged Scandinavian-looking woman who apparently lives in Cairo. She was accusing her three mechanics of deliberately cutting one of her spark plugs. She had it there with her as evidence, as well as some photos. As I was leaving, I heard the Captain say: “So you accuse them?” I’ll never hear how that story ends.

It might be interesting to spend a day at one of these Cairo police precinct houses and see exactly what happens there.

another reason to finish early

Because you may lose your passport before the trip and have to spend two days getting a new one! That’s what just happened to me. Looked for my passport last night, couldn’t find it, made a special roundtrip all the way to my office and it wasn’t there either. It’s not anywhere, and I only have a vague idea of where I might have lost it.

That put me in a furniture-kicking mood. But I guess it’s not that bad to need this many years and trips to finally lose a passport. I would have expected to lose it somewhere more far-flung, like Tamil Nadu or somewhere in Bosnia, not between my home and office (that’s the only route on which it could have happened).

Anyway, I’ll get a new one tomorrow morning. It’s $100 for an emergency 3-month passport, which is actually a bit cheaper than I expected. The part I didn’t like was wasting 5 hours today (U.S. Embassy and two separate police stations) with still another 2-3 hours to be wasted tomorrow (U.S. Embassy and the Egyptian Immigration Ministry). But I feel fortunate… if I had waited until today to look for my passport, it would be too late to do anything about it, and my lecture in Croatia would be read, embarrassingly, in absentia. I must say, those guys were extremely cool about it when I warned them last night about what I was facing.

In any case, that’s another good reason to finish your writing tasks early. Things tend to come up at the end. If I had been running between all those offices today with the lecture unfinished, I’d have been one of the most miserable creatures on the planet.

another cameo by Zubiri

Levi continues to PUT ZUBIRI TO GOOD USE.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen ancient Greek in a *URL* before, though perhaps I haven’t been looking closely enough.