Matt > Recent Status Updates

Wenn ich [den Steuermann] recht verstand, würde der besagte Jüngste Tag damit beginnen, daß das Meer seine Toten zurückgab – also mit einem ziemlich düsteren Aspekt, wenn man bedenkt, wie die meisten unserer Berufskollegen aussehen würden, nach soviel Jahren im Salzwasser.

Drollig.
Inskekten haben das Weiche drinnen und das Harte draußen. Menschen haben das Harte drinnen und das Weiche draußen.
Der Mensch ist ein umgestülptes Insekt...

Schiller sang:
„Seid umschlungen, Millionen!“
Jedesmal, wenn dem Studenten diese Worte in den Sinn kamen, fand er, daß es keine scheußlichere Verszeile gab.
Doppelt scheußlich, weil sie in einem Gedicht stand, das den Titel hatte:
„An die Freude.“
Die Menschheit: eine enorme, massive, verfilzte, umarmte Kugel aus Fleisch. Ein gigantischer Fleischklumpen.
Freude?
Menschheitsklumpen! Weltklumpen!

Französische Zahlen! Die sind so schwierig, daß die Franzosen während des Weltkriegs, wenn sie jemand vor sich hatten, der vorgab Franzose zu sein, den sie aber eher für einen ausländischen Spion hielten, diesen einfach französisch zählen ließen. Sag 14394, sagten sie. Das konnte der Mann nicht sagen. Sie erschossen ihn.

V spricht man auf norwegisch nicht wie ein F aus, sondern wie ein W. Einfach wie ein deutsches W.
Dann deutete der Deutsche mit dem Zeigefinger, wollte wissen, was Å für ein Buchstabe ist. Ein Å? Wird wie das deutsche O ausgesprochen. Aber man hat im Norwegischen, sagte der Deutsche, doch wohl auch den Buchstaben O? Ja natürlich. Und wie wird der ausgesprochen? Wie U.
Der Mann zwinkerte. Die Welt ist komisch!

Ich nahm das Buch zur Hand in der fester Erwartung, es würde mir nicht gefallen. Und jetzt mag ich es auf den ersten Seiten plötzlich! Aber ich finde schon noch etwas zum Nörgeln. Bei Mykle findet sich immer was.

“I’m telling you about this ‘you people’ business. ‘You people’ one more time, son, and I am going to ask you to leave the house. […] Because I know very well what ‘you people’ means. And so do you. So does everyone. Don’t you use those two words in this house ever again.”

On Kierkegaard’s view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit [ethical life] and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair.

There can be no approximation to an ideal outcome in which the kingdom of ends is realized, since there is a tragic flaw, as it were, at the metaphysical heart of the world itself. Satisfaction would consist in attaining one’s goals, but, since “there is no ultimate aim of striving … there is no measure or end of suffering” and thus no satisfaction.
-- Schopenhauer

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
-- Jagger/Richards

Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Schelling thought that the idea that “either things are or are not” might itself not be exhaustive of the ways in which the “absolute” – that is, God – can be characterized, and, since our own human ways of thinking require that opposition as normatively basic, any apprehension of God must therefore be intuitive, that is, metaphorical and indirect[…]requires a way of telling a kind of “myth”[…]

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
-- Karl Marx

Hegel was also acutely aware of the problem that extreme poverty and extreme wealth poses for modern civil society, since, at both ends of the spectrum, individuals lose their sense of obligation to the “whole” – one because they have no stake in it, the other because they tend to think that they can buy themselves out of its obligations.

Herr Povondra liest wieder einmal Zeitung



»Glaubst du, es könnte Krieg geben?«

Andrias Scheuchzeri ist das animal faber, und es ist durchaus möglich, daß er schon in absehbarer Zeit technisch selbst den Menschen übertrifft, und das einzig kraft der in seiner Natur begründeten Tatsache, daß er eine rein männliche Gemeinschaft geschaffen hat.

Vor-lu-vi-ale Fauna auf Insel des Pazifiks
»Präliduviale«
»Nein, präviduale. Herrgott noch mal, wie ist das eigentlich?«

»Antiluvial. Anteduvial. Nein.«
»Antediluvial«

One of the catch phrases [Hegel] adopted to mark out his own distinctive post-Kantian position was not to speak of nature and mind (Geist) as two worlds or two realms that had to be divided into the empirical and the transcendental. Instead, Geist (or, put in the more abstract terms of the Logic, the Idea) is subject only to those reasons of which it can regard itself as the author;[…]

»Mensch, Teufel gibt’s keine. Und wenn, dann müßten sie wie Europäer aussehen.«

Once back in his room I watched him carefully emptying the contents of his stomach onto the table.

(deliberately taken out of context; this sentence doesn't mean at all what you think it means)

A central claim in Hegel’s Logic […] is that the importance of formal syllogistic logic cannot itself be understood purely formally but depends on a prior understanding of non-formal material such as how the subject and predicate terms were “distributed” in the premises, so as to block syllogisms such as “Socrates is white, white is a color, therefore Socrates is a color.”

In Hegel’s post-Kantian reformulation of the problem, there is simply nothing more to the quantitative infinite than what is expressed in such formulas, and the quantitative infinite is thus ideal, since it is never grasped in some individual experience of things, but is comprehended fully and truly only in thought, in the formulas of the integral and differential calculus.

In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might compromise what his “pure” conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually concerned only with himself; in the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.

Can't elude Kant.

Not surprisingly, interpreters have always had trouble making sense of the [Phenomenology of Spirit]; it has been held, variously, to be a “coming of age” novel (a Bildungsroman), a new version of the divine comedy, a tragedy, a tragi-comedy, a work in epistemology, a philosophy of history, a treatise in Christian theology, and an announcement of the death of God.

Peter Handke, he says. You like Peter Handke? I wrote this years ago myself.

You wrote it yourself?

I mean, I read it myself. Entschuldigung. He laughs. Yes, I read it years ago.