two good essay links

Wonderful… I’ve just taken a first look for awhile at Avoiding the Void’s DICTIONARY OF MY CONCEPTS, and found the following additions.

First, there is “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human.” It appeared in 2007 in Naked Punch, which seems to be run out of Birkbeck College in London. But few of my readers knew it was there, and moreover I think I was the only author in that issue whose name wasn’t on the cover. But HERE IS MY LEVINAS ESSAY. This one focuses on Otherwise Than Being, whereas the recent piece in Philosophy Today focuses on Totality and Infinity.

The second one is not by me, but by José Ortega y Gasset. It’s called “An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface” (found in English in Phenomenology and Art). I wrote on it extensively in Guerrilla Metaphysics, and it should be clear to anyone reading it what I took from it. Reading it as an 18-year-old was one of those “electric shock” experiences. There was something weird about it. Moreover, Ortega never developed it, and chose to focus instead on the “I am myself and my circumstances” mantra that I now recognize as just a faintly realist form of correlationism. Anyway HERE IS ORTEGA’S ESSAY ON METAPHOR.

NOTICE: I do not endorse either the one blatantly sexist remark or the milder anti-England remark found in Ortega’s essay. It’s a masterpiece anyway.

The first thing one must say about Ortega is that he was a fabulous writer: short-listed for the Nobel in Literature, and probably deserved to win (but never did). At times he shares Dewey’s flaw of not being quite dense enough, in the sense that he’s leading you along by the hand, and you lose track of the main intellectual landmarks amidst the long buildup of clear sentences that try to prepare you for the central point. (Not that Dewey was as good a writer as Ortega; he wasn’t.)

Most of the time, Ortega is simply focused on attacking the idea of an idealist cogito floating above the world. Fair enough, but by now that work has largely been done, and we aren’t really there anymore. What’s different about his “Esthetics” essay (it was the preface to a book of poems by someone else) is its Weird Realist twist. Executant reality (cf. tool-being) is never reducible to an image, and metaphor is the collision between the two. Furthermore, Ortega takes a slight step in Whitehead’s direction with his unexpected claim that everything can be thought of as an “I” when viewed from its own standpoint. In short, the strife between execution and image is not one between human consciousness and what lies outside it, but between reality and relation.

And since I read that essay before ever finishing a book by Heidegger, in some sense my philosophy is Ortegan rather than Heideggerian.