Freedoms

People distinguish between 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'. But this is barely to scratch the adpositional surface. What about 'freedom of, in, for, on, with, as, by, at, against...'? 'Freedom in spite of'? 'Freedom with respect to...'? 'Freedom except for …'?

On 9-11

Slavoj Zizek argues that the Sept 11th terrorist attack on the New York Twin Towers ‘recalled the other defining catastrophe from the beginning of the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic’ [Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p.15]. One interesting feature of the comparison is precisely the way it focuses our attention on the airborne nature of the collision: instead of the (mobile) embodiment of Western technical/ideological triumph crashing into the (unyielding) Natural Necessity, Sept 11th gave us the reverse. The iceberg flew suddenly into frame and collided with the titanic towers. It recalls Malcolm X’s famous interpretation of black America history, about not landing on Plymouth rock, but having the rock land on us. In other words, the striking thing about the Sept 11th catastrophe was our atonished realisation that an iceberg, as it were, could fly.

A question about obviousness

What’s so wrong with being obvious? I ask because I'm starting to get a better (a less illusioned, I think) perspective on, oh, myself; and it may be that I'm one one of those people whose allergy to the obvious and fondness for the oblique runs smack-bang-ouch into the brute fact that I possess a mind and imagination that are both, as it happens, rather obvious. So I'm wondering why the allergy? And exactly in what ways, and to what extent, does the wrongness of the obviousness inhere?

I ask. I don't answer.

Death, life

‘Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through’ [Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.4311]. But what a strangely instantaneous notion of death! And wouldn’t it be better to say that death is something we begin to live through; and that whilst we can't of course complete the ‘living through’ of death, this matters much less than you might think. Stitching full-bodied constellations out of discrete and few stars is what human beings do, after all. We all can piece together a whole play from a suitably full fragment, or extrapolate a whole statue from a trunk. Bodying forth the shape death takes as a lived event is what we start to do as soon as we start out dying; which is to say, from our youth onwards.

Art

Where art is concerned, tradition and originality are incompatible. Or perhaps a better word would be immiscible: for some of the best avant-garde art has precisely that oil-and-water-y quality.

Philosophical gas

We can think, perhaps, of philosophy as such as a metaphorical air: which is to say, not as the medium through which ‘concepts’ or ‘truth’ are carried, but as the possibility of concepts themselves. Schopenhauer said: “I have never professed to propound a philosophy that would leave no questions answered. In this sense philosophy is actually impossible; it would be the science of omniscience. But … there is a limit up to which reflection can penetrate, and so far illuminate the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. This limit is reached by my doctrine of the will-to-live that affirms or denies itself in its own phenomenon. To want to go beyond this is, in my view, like wanting to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop here.’ [Schopenhauer, vol II, p.591-2]. It can be agreed that the philosopher flies on the air, and cannot fly without the air. But what if the air does not come to an end, only thins to one degree or another? Can a Philosopher fly this infinitely attenuating medium – to the moon?

Non-paradox

‘Can you tell me who won the losers’ race?’ only looks like a paradox. Why should the losers, gathered together into one race, want to make a virtue of their failing? Which one of them wouldn’t think to themselves, ‘now, in this company of losers, I have my best chance yet to transform myself into a winner …’