Posts

Showing posts from February, 2025

Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

Image
'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...

Reading Dialectically: Beginning without beginning- The Science of Logic (Intro)

Image
' It is the privilege of philosophy to choose such expressions from the language of ordinary life, which is made for the world of imaginary representations, as seem to approximate the determinations of the concept. There is no question of demonstrating for a word chosen from ordinary life that in ordinary life too the same concept is associated with that for which philosophy uses it, for ordinary life has no concepts, only representations of the imagination, and to recognize the concept in what is otherwise mere representation is philosophy itself. It must therefore suffice if representation, for those of its expressions that philosophy uses for its definitions, has only some rough approximation of their distinctive difference; it may also be the case that in these expressions one recognizes pictorial adumbrations which, as approximations, are close indeed to the corresponding concepts'. GWF Hegel- Science of Logic The concepts of Hegel's Science of logic (SOL) are not synt...

Reading Dialectically: The representation of Value (Capital- Section 1)

Image
Each of these short posts on Marx's Capital I and Hegel Science of Logic should not be read as summaries but precisely as the title suggests as a way of 'reading dialectically' through a series of arguments that are canonical to the Hegel-Marx event, which should, all humour aside, have its own geological timestamp. What I am attempting to trace here are short arguments between these thinkers that produce a convergent series: that basically produce a pure relata which negates the terms of the relation, on which the second chapter of the Science of Logic will produce a similar short engagement, later on, on this blog.  By 'reading' here I mean the most basic act of reading a landscape, as much as reading a book, that is the act of carving out a territory of thought. One can even take dialectics in the most basic way, through Marx, to mean 'a tradition of argumentation'. Consider for example a religious text. Drawn apart from its tradition of argumentation, it...

Foucault on Matter Out of Place

 'that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately, in the lawless and uncharted dimension of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal etymological sense; in such a state, things are "laid," "placed," "arranged" in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them all. Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common n...