Matt > Recent Status Updates

“I’ll never rest ’appy till I see that ’ell-’ound bloody well dead.  ’E cawn’t live as long as me.  ’E’s got no right to live, an’ as the Good Word puts it, ‘’E shall shorely die,’ an’ I s’y, ‘Amen, an’ damn soon at that.’”

Kant thought that, while we have an ethical obligation to keep our promises, with regard to contracts we can only speak of legal obligations […]; Fries argues for the more rigoristic view that “contract” just is “promise,” and that lying therefore ought to be a legal infraction, not merely a reprehensible ethical lapse.

The decision to act evilly is thus based on a prior disposition to want to be God, to have all of life and reality within one's control; but the desire to be God effectuates itself in the denial of the possibility of love and thus of the full reality of others.

“And he has never philosophized on life?”

“No, and he is all the happier for leaving life alone.
He is too busy living it to think about it.
My mistake was in ever opening the books.”

The boundary between the subjective and the objective is not metaphysically fixed but normatively determined, and the “intuition” of where that boundary lies itself always “oversteps the boundary, or is both inside and outside the boundary at the same time.”

Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it’s life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.

The only alternative to a state in which the bonds between people are each citizen’s noble temperament would be that of a state “governed like a factory,” which, so Novalis went on to claim, Prussia had been since the death of Friedrich Wilhelm I. In such an order, the ruling principle had become that of “egoism” and “self-interest” (which forms the “germ of the revolution of our time”).

For Schleiermacher (as for the other early Romantics), the desire to be “at home” should not be construed as sanctioning the imposition position of some kind of orthodoxy of belief on those who cannot share one's ideals; the true “home” is in the free religious community and the acknowledgement of the necessary plurality of religions.

“Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualitative raising to a higher power. The lower self is identified with a better self in this operation. This operation is as yet quite unknown. By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinity to finite, I romanticize them.”

(Novalis)

The early Romantics, according to Hegel, radicalized a traditional European and Christian conception of purity of heart as a “beautiful soul” into a self-undermining focus on one’s own subjectivity and feelings: they thus ended up either as psychologically lamed agents […], or as hypocritical ironists unable to commit themselves to anything except the smug assertion of their own moral and aesthetic superiority.

phew!

A footnote with a list of Dän & Fr's EMGs incl. ZT page numbers comes in quite handy!

[The] state should be construed as the institution that embodies the common will and is thereby in the appropriate position to “judge” all of the citizens and sanction them accordingly. The problem […] has to do with whom in the state would ever be in a position to make such judgments, […] namely, that no man should be a judge in his own case.

Ha! Ha!

It have just noticed: The author's name is Doris Plöschberger!

[For] a subject, an “I,” to be said to be issuing inference licenses in the first place, it must be able to entertain both “A” and “not-A.” Otherwise, it will never be able to commit itself to any particular inference license at all. Negation, like normativity in general, is not a part of the natural world but is the result of subjects instituting certain normative statuses[…]

DYK AS pondered alternative titles for ZT, like "Arnheim" or "Rotman" [sic], and some that are way too long to put here.

Fichte also considered his system to be a continual work in progress […] This has made interpreting Fichte especially laborious; there are sixteen different versions of the Wissenschaftslehre in his collected writings, each differing from the other in crucial ways, and almost anything one says in general about the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole can be countered with some contrary passage in one of the versions.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind.

“Through faith we know that we have a body, and that there are other bodies and other thinking beings outside of us. A veritable and wondrous revelation!” And if our belief in our own bodies and in a mechanical, natural world is ultimately grounded in “faith” (or “immediate certainty”), then why not go the whole route and accept on faith the existence of a personal God?

Jegliches hat seine Zeit: würgen und heilen, brechen und bauen, weinen und lachen, klagen und tanzen, suchen und verlieren, zerreißen und zumachen. Es ist die Zeit zum Würgen, Klagen, Suchen, und Zerreißen.

[…] given man’s “unsocial sociability” and his natural propensity to twist the moral law to his own advantage, the production of the “ethical commonwealth” as the goal toward which history is ideally (as if) aiming would also require that mankind have a human master who could break his will and force him to obey a will that is universally valid and who would himself be perfectly just and not subject to radical evil.

Der Mensch ist ein häßliches Tier, der Feind aller Feinde, das widrigste Geschöpf, das es auf der Erde gibt […] Es ist nicht gut, in einem Menschenleib zu leben, ich will lieber kauern unter der Erde, über die Felder laufen und fressen, was ich finde, und der Wind weht, und der Regen fällt, und die Kälte kommt und vergeht, das ist besser als in einem Menschenleib leben.

[…] he who takes such an interest in the beauties of nature can do so only in so far as he previously has firmly established his interest in the morally good. If, therefore, the beauty of Nature interests a man immediately we have reason for attributing to him, at least, a basis for a good moral disposition.

Wie ich genug hatte und krank wurde, was hab ich gemacht? Meinen Sie, ich werde warten, bis ich mich durchliege? Wozu? Ich habe die Morphiumflasche neben mich stellen lassen, und dann habe ich gesagt, man soll Musik machen, Klavier spielen, Jazzmusik, die neusten Schlager. Ich habe mir aus Platon vorlesen lassen, das große Gastmahl, das ist ein schönes Gespräch[…]

The evil person is he who subordinates the moral law to self-love, making his motive for obeying the moral law into a reason having to do with his own personal advantage. It is not that people do evil for its own sake[…]but that they become perverse in their willing, lacking enough strength of will to do what is so clearly right[…]

Meanwhile at the State Department