Gibbon on eunuchs

Constantine’s death left his three confusingly-named sons as co-Emperors: Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Middle child Constantius eventually succeeded in killing off his two brothers. But not with happy results, in Gibbon’s view:

“The divided provinces of the empire were again united by the victory of Constantius; but, as that feeble prince was destitute of personal merit, either in peace or in war; as he feared his generals and distrusted his ministers; the triumph of his arms served only to establish the reign of the eunuchs over the Roman world. Those unhappy beings, the ancient production of oriental jealousy and despotism, were introduced into Greece and Rome by the contagion of Asiatic luxury. Their progress was rapid; and the eunuchs, who, in the time of Augustus, had been abhorred, as the monstrous retinue of an Egyptian queen, were gradually admitted into the families of matrons, of senators, and of the emperors themselves… The aversion and contempt which mankind has so uniformly entertained for that imperfect species appears to have degraded their character, and to have rendered them almost incapable as they were supposed to be of conceiving any generous sentiment or of performing any worthy action. But the eunuchs were skilled in the arts of flattery and intrigue; and they alternately governed the mind of Constantius by his fears, his indolence, and his vanity.”

lava lamps

THIS ARTICLE ON LAVA LAMPS FROM THE ONION is also a link in my previous post, but it’s so funny that it doesn’t deserve to be lost in the shuffle. I quoted extensively from this article in one of my recent articles on the McLuhan tetrad. Marshall McLuhan would have loved it.

Heidegger’s “temporality”

This is an oldie but a goodie, and still causes controversy even though it shouldn’t.

Heidegger has no theory of time at all.

The supposed “temporality” of Dasein in Heidegger is nothing more than its state of thrown projection. In other words, Dasein finds itself always already in a world that it cannot fully grasp, but which is nonetheless partly grasped, projected “as” such-and-such a world. These two moments correspond to what Heidegger means by past and future. Put them together, and you have an ambiguous present, torn between opposed poles of shadow and light. This is Heidegger’s basic methodological trick in 90% of the topics he discusses. You can even find it in the infamous Rectoral Address when Heidegger says that students are called to three forms of service. Believe me, he didn’t come up with that number empirically, as if he were brainstorming at breakfast “how many kinds of student service are there?”, and then accidentally determined that there were three kinds and couldn’t think of any others. That’s not how Heidegger works.

So, there you have Heideggerian temporality… an ambiguous present torn between that which is concealed and that which is revealed.

But notice that this has nothing to do with “time” at all. It’s a merely verbal similarity. Heidegger’s theory of temporality is indifferent on the Bergsonian question of whether or not time can be built up out of cinematic frames. If it turned out that time were a “stop-action” sort of thing, built out of millions of isolated statuesque poses, Heidegger’s theory of temporality would still work perfectly well.

I’ve noticed that for some reason, no one wants to see this. It is always assumed that Heidegger’s threefold temporality also entails automatically that time cannot be split into isolated instants (despite the obvious importance for Heidegger of the Augenblick or “moment”). But to repeat, Heidegger’s temporality has nothing to do with time in the usual sense of the term. He tells us nothing about whether time is made of instants or of a durational flow that cannot be broken up into elemental pieces.

Heideggerians will counter that Heidegger criticized the notion of “a sequence of now-points.” But they fail to see that, while both Heidegger and Bergson would agree that “time is not a sequence of now-points,” they would do so for completely different reasons. In Bergson’s case, obviously, it’s because there is no such thing as a now-point in the first place; time cannot be cut up into frames, Bergson 101. But in Heidegger’s case the critique is directed not against the now-points, but against the sequence. The problem as Heidegger sees it is that traditional theories of time saw all the drama unfolding in the passage from one now-point to another. The traditional theories did not grasp how much drama was already packed into a single instant. For the tradition, time contained a present-at-hand “now,” fully unfolded, and though certain paradoxes followed from this, the presence of the now wasn’t inherently problematic. For Heidegger, however, the “now” is only half-filled with presence, while the other half is a riddle of veiling, concealment, shadow, or whatever you wish to call it.

In Latour it’s even a step beyond that… For Latour, the absolute concreteness of every entity means that time must be built out of cinematic frames. He’s never said that explicitly in any of his books, but I’ve tried to argue that it follows directly from the basic principles of Irreductions. However, Latour has reacted with acceptance to my characterization of him as “the anti-Bergson.”

In the “later Latour,” not yet much published, there will be a mode of existence known as REP, or “reproduction,” meaning that the thing must replicate itself in order to continue in existence. This is a sort of occasionalism without God, and is indeed the antithesis of Bergsonian philosophy.

Yet a couple of Latourians have been angered at this interpretation of him. Why? I think it’s simply that the Zeitgeist these days is very proud of its discovery that there aren’t isolated substances or isolated moments of time, but everything flows together and is both unified and not-unified, and all is holistically interactive with all. Therefore, anyone who speaks about anything in isolation must be a reactionary idiot. And since Latour is not a reactionary idiot, he can’t possibly believe that time is made up of individual frames.

In answer to this, let me first say that I’ve defended my reading of Latour in Prince of Networks and won’t do so again here. What concerns me more in this context is the widespread failure to understand another McLuhanite principle: retrieval.

In other words, the attitude seems to be “isolated substances are old-fashioned, isolated moments of time are old-fashioned. Let us not revisit these archaic theories of yesteryear, for we have now permanently advanced to the realization that everything is holistically interlinked, and that time is a silky-smooth becoming, not a series of isolated now-points.”

This seems to me to be a false picture of how intellectual progress occurs. In any choice between two basic structural options in human knowledge, it is safe to assume that both options are exaggerations. One might prevail for a few centuries, but generally the one that was repressed returns in different guise. That’s what McLuhan means by retrieval.

This is most easily seen in the sphere of fashion. During my youth, no one would have been caught dead wearing the “bell-bottom” style pants that had been popular when my parents were young in the late 1960’s. But during my first years of university teaching, I noticed that the students were all wearing them again. Disco was killed off briefly, but retrieved in adapted form as techno music– the first JUAN ATKINS techno tracks date to 1983 1982, with disco already passé by a few years. (“The Onion” has a hilarious article trying to account for WHERE LAVA LAMPS ARE ON THE POP CULTURE HIERARCHY AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT.)

Likewise, if you want to know where the untapped energy is likely to lie in philosophy, look at which concepts have been most out of fashion recently. On that list you will find realism, isolated substances, isolated moments of time… Those who beat these concepts beat the corpse of a horse. But dead horses often return to life.

unconvincing weapons

There are certain citations in philosophy that are always made with the air of game-enders, despite the fact that they dodge the point completely. I can think of two, just off the top of my head.

Heidegger: “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.”

The actual quotation is grammatically a bit more complicated than that, but this is the form in which it is circulated with a “game-ender” tone. This is in fact one of the stupidest and least interesting things that Heidegger ever said. Does he really want to claim that biography and philosophy have no intersection at all? At best, it is a dubious and arguable claim that is not entitled to the smirks with which it is invariably uttered. On the two or three occasions when it was played on me during discussion, the people saying it acted as though they were flicking cigar ashes on my tie.

But as if by the force of karma, Heidegger is repaid by having to endure the following…

Derrida: “the fourfold is the most beautiful postcard that Heidegger sent us from Freiburg.”

(Translation: “I have no idea what the fourfold means. But instead of saying ‘I don’t know what it means,’ I will create a distraction with a pseudo-poetic statement that dismisses it, changing the focus from my puzzled state to my eloquence.”)

This passage is generally cited as though it were some unbelievably elegant witticism. But it’s neither elegant nor insightful. What is it really telling us, after all? The image of a postcard here has no force except for some vague, unspoken resonance with Derrida’s own title La carte postale. But more importantly, the fourfold is a lot bigger than that, and can’t just be dismissed with a vague and flowery phrase.

What is the central text of Heidegger in the post-war period? “Einblick in das was ist,” the 1949 Bremen lecture. Why do I say this? Because all of his work on technology and language from the 1950’s can be found in this long lecture, or “lecture cycle” if you prefer to think of it as multiple lectures.

What is the central concept of 1949? The fourfold. This is no mere bibliographical trick… Try making sense of Heidegger on language or technology without invoking the fourfold. It’s all over his reflections on those themes.

And yet, how many commentators have not just made half-embarrassed summaries of das Geviert, but called it central to his philosophy? Only two commentators that I know of.

One is the author of this blog.

The other is Jean-François Mattei of Nice. He’s not referenced in Tool-Being because even though Mattei’s book appeared in 2001, and even though I bought it in the same year as it appeared (I was in Paris for all of that August), Tool-Being had been sent to the publisher in final form in January of 2001. [ADDENDUM: I just noticed that, oddly, Amazon.fr misstates the title of the book. It’s simply Heidegger et Hölderlin, not De Heidegger à Hölderlin.]

Mattei’s purposes are scholarly rather than systematic. He doesn’t offer his own ontological interpretation of the fourfold and its importance. But what he does better than anyone is to show just how central the fourfold is throughout Heidegger’s career, including at a fairly early stage. My one gripe is that Mattei does nothing as far as I’m aware with the 1919 lecture course, where the fourfold is already present in Heidegger’s rebellious interpretation of Husserl. “Too much Hölderlin, not enough Husserl” is how I would state my complaint about Mattei’s book. But he does a fine job with Hölderlin, and almost as fine a job with Aristotle, and Brentano’s thesis on him.

I do wish that someone would translate Mattei’s book, one of the best books on Heidegger I’ve read. It’s both fresh and solid at the same time, a difficult combination to achieve.

Oh, here’s another unconvincing weapon, again from Heidegger I’m afraid.

Heidegger: “Tell me what you think about translation, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Those who cite this statement always seem to assume that what they think about translation will make them come out smelling like roses. No one ever seems to wonder if it might backfire on them.

of things heard: crows

This comes from a reader I know well, though I don’t know the original source and so can’t point to it. If true, it means the crows are watching you:

“I heard some amazing crow research results today. Two professors – one in the east and one in the west – were studying crows. They climbed trees and banded young crows in their nests. The baby crows really squawked about this and all the crows in the area got upset and boisterous. Both professors soon found that wherever they went, crows vocalized loudly at them – but not at other people. They decided that crows could identify specific people but they had no idea how they did this. Was it smell or something else?

They decided to see if crows could identify human faces so one professor bought a cave man mask and banded some more crow nestlings. Whenever he wore the mask on campus, the crows would follow him and make a racket. So he gave the mask to different students to wear at different times and different places and they got the same boisterous reaction 100% of the time. He then wondered if the mask had a specific smell so he bought a Dick Cheney mask and wore it around campus and got no crow reaction nor did the students he lent it to.

He then got the cave man mask back out and started to wear it upside down. He found that crows would fly by him and turn their heads UPSIDE DOWN to check his face. They would then start making a racket! He has concluded that it is life or death to crows to be able to identify specific people because some people feed crows and some shoot them – as happens in his own neighborhood. Fascinating.”

Olbers’ paradox

Cameron takes issue with the recent Agamben passage:

“The quotation from Agamben that someone sent you has its astronomy a bit skewed. The solution of Olbers’ Paradox does not depend on the fact that ‘the galaxies from which the light originates move away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light’ – which would be an impossibility, given current physics.

That’s the sort of garbled representation of a scientific example that’s bait for the Alan Sokal types out there.

Interestingly, one of the first generally correct attempts to resolve Olbers’ paradox was by Edgar A. Poe, who commented on the issue in Eureka:

‘No astronomical fallacy is more untenable, and none has been more pertinaciously adhered to, than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars. The reasons for limitation, as I have already assigned them, a priori seem to me unanswerable; but not to speak of these, observation assures us that there is, in numerous directions around us, certainly, if not in all, a positive limit – or, at the very least, affords us no basis whatever for thinking otherwise. Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all. That this may be so who shall venture to deny? I maintain, simply, that we have not even the shadow of a reason for believing that it is so.’

Note that in current mainstream cosmological models, the observable ‘background’ is dark only with regard to visible light. The light from the early universe is redshifted (due to the expansion of the universe) into microwave wave-lengths, and is detectable to us as the well-known cosmic microwave background radiation.

Olbers’ Paradox is actually a great example to use in intro philosophy classes. It asks for an explanation of an everyday observable phenomenon for which the only coherent explanations require a theoretical picture (or model – ‘échantillon architectonique’ in Leibniz’s sense) of the entire universe.”