Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Saturday, March 23, 2024

Montesquieu's Thoughts on Hong Kong today


Just as the sea, which seems to want to cover the whole earth, is checked by the grasses and the smallest bits of gravel on the shore, so monarchs, whose power seems boundless, are checked by the slightest obstacles …. [1]

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)



[1] Montesquieu, The Sprit of the Laws, ed. and tr. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 18. [Part I, Book 2, Chapter 4]

Saturday, March 9, 2024

News Flash: Trump is not God – maybe look to Chinese (not Roman) Emperors as his model

In these pages I have written previously of how Trump – who, with the help of Steve Bannon - aims to “deconstruct” the American rule of law.  “Deconstruction” is a term massively popularized by Derrida and his many followers, and it served as a left-wing surrogate for Marxism while that particular ideology waned under the revelations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, first translated in 1974.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, Derrida’s anti-authoritarian “deconstruction” became de rigeur in academic circles, particularly in theory-starved – and sometimes woefully uncritical - North America.

The term “deconstruction” actually derives from Heidegger’s concept of “Destruktion”, which, originally appearing in Being and Time (1927), was likely inspired – if that’s the right word – by the experiences of the First World War.[1]  Heidegger was quick to point out that “to bury the past in nullity is not the purpose of destruction; its aim is positive.”[2] However, in light of his notorious Black Notebooks, published in 2014, Heidegger may have been dabbling in sophistry here by suggesting that his term was more evocative of setting “limits” than any actual demolishing.[3] What appears as a transformative concept for Heidegger, the eventual Nazi-philosopher king, came to be adopted by the Left under Derrida, with both sharing fundamental anti-humanistic assumptions.  How suitably ironic that today’s academia and popular media still proudly brandish a term that came to fruition in a war that profoundly altered the course of world history.

The circle of “deconstruction” is made complete by Trump when he repeats his mantra that he has “immunity” from any actions stemming from his provocation of insurrectionary violence on 6 January, 2021.  It speaks volumes that the conservative majority of “justices” at the U.S. Supreme Court, three of whom, in record form – otherwise known as hook and crook - Trump had brought into office during his term, is dragging its heels in dealing with the former president’s preposterous claims.  Have they obliterated from memory the entire Anglo-American legal tradition stemming from the famous Magna Carta, which determined – so it is said - from even earlier practice that the Crown was not above the law?  Apparently so!  Trump’s claims should be laughed out of all courts of law.  And a great many of his lawyers should be roundly penalized for their pretenses and helping to legitimate an evident conspiracy against the American Constitution.

By claiming “immunity”, Trump is not preparing for a wicked variation on Divine Rule, for which he is sometimes ridiculed, certainly given his many character and intellectual flaws which make him monstrously too human. Any aspirations to so-called divinity could invite rival pretenders across the globe, or in the U.S.A. where anything goes. Rather, Trump’s statement of “immunity” is made simply to the effect, perhaps a bit like Napoleon who crowned himself Pope (well in advance of his march on Moscow), that all authority emanates from his own self.[4]  Napoleon had modelled his eponymous Code on Roman precedents, despite saying otherwise.[5]  Put another way: the toga – for example - is not a part of Trump’s wardrobe, as it was with Napoleon; instead, the former president’s unadorned “immunity” claims serve as the naked follow-up to a “deconstruction” of the rule of law as we know it. 

If Trump gets re-elected, the chances are more than likely, to my mind, that he will pardon himself for the events of 6 January (and for everything else he has done).  He thus makes himself resistant to the written “rule of law” which applies to everyone else, except himself - for whom any apparent “law” is unwritten. [6]  In this regard, he makes himself largely akin to a traditional Chinese Emperor, save for the fact that a division of powers is still extant in the U.S.A.  Nowadays we do see aspirations to a “rule by law,” and the Chinese example may serve best as a living model to Trump, who shows no sign of historical depth. 

To return to my earlier theme, Derrida is representative of a significant split from the humanist tradition among recent French theorists and philosophers.  Thus, prevailing systems of thought organized around the illiberal principle of nonhumanism – as exemplified by China – may appear as more fashionable to wannabe supporters of Trump.  Or have we gone full circle in yet another respect?  Did the Destruktion of the First World War, which spawned the fascism of the Second World War, end up reviving a latent fascism today which appears implicit in the assumptions behind Derrida’s “deconstruction”?  Has the cultural memory of fascism, in other words, been prodded by Derrida’s clear praise for both the Chinese ideogram and the unrepentant Mussolini supporter Ezra Pound?  In any event, Derrida’s central work, Of Grammatology (translated 1976), celebrates a “break in the most entrenched Western tradition” for which we are now paying consequences.[7] The Age of Trump was prefaced by postmodernism, and he could not have asked for a better introduction to his set of so-called “rules.”

Another way of illustrating my point is to consider Trump - as I have already hinted - against the light of Roman law.  As Fernanda Pirie explains in her book, The Rule of Laws (2021), “A sense that [Roman] law, ius, represented higher principles, that it should provide resources for citizen and constrain the ruler, was not eclipsed by even the most autocratic emperors.”[8] Thus, Trump is clearly outside the foundations of the Western legal tradition and stands apart from “a sense law was made by and for Roman citizens and that it held the promise of justice for all.”[9]

 

 

 



[1] Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, tr. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 79.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 44.  The index in this book – at least under the heading for Destruktion – is unworkable.

[3] Ibid., p. 44. See also Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 79, as well as Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (New Have, Yale, 2022).

[4] To put Napoleon’s unprecedented move (taking the crown from the Pope in 1804) in greater context, Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope in the year 800.  See Fernanda Pirie, The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the World (New York: Basic Books, 2021), p. 154.

[5] Ibid., p. 336, 337.

[6] Ibid., pp. 95, 96.

[7] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 92.  Originally published in French in 1967.

[8] Pirie, The Rule of Laws, p. 122.

[9] Ibid., p. 97.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Sergeant Schultz (“I know nothing”) follows from Thomas Mann’s novel ‘Doctor Faustus’

Having spent a year with Adrian in Leipzig, I know how he lived during the other three of his stay there; his manner of life being so regular and conservative that I found it rigid and sometimes even depressing.  Not for nothing, in that first letter, he had expressed his sympathy for Chopin’s lack of adventurous spirit, his ‘not wanting to know.’  He too wanted to experience nothing, see nothing, actually experience nothing, at least not in any obvious sense of the word.  He was not out for change, new sense impressions, distraction, recreation.  As for the last, he liked to make fun of people who were constantly having ‘a little change,’ constantly getting brown and strong – and nobody knew for what.  ‘Relaxation,’ he said, ‘is for those it does no good.’  He was not interested in travel for the sake of sightseeing or ‘culture.’  He scorned the delight of the eye, and sensitive as his hearing was, just so little had he ever felt urged to train his sight in the forms of plastic art.  The distinction between eye-men and ear-men he considered indefeasibly valid and correct and counted himself definitely among the latter.  As for me, I have never thought such distinction could be followed through thick and thin, and in his case I never quite believed in the unwillingness and reluctance of the eye.  To be sure, Goethe says that music is something inborn and native, requiring no great nourishment from outside and no experience drawn from life.  But after all there is the inner vision, the perception, which is something different and comprehends more than mere seeing.  And more than that, it is profoundly contradictory that a man should have, as Leverkühn did, some feeling for the human eye, which after all speaks only to the eye, and yet refuse to perceive the outer world through that organ.  I need only to mention the names of Marie Godeau, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and Nepomuk Schneidewein to bring home to myself Adrian’s receptivity, yes, weakness for the magic of the eye, the black and blue.  Of course I am quite clear that I am doing wrong to bombard the reader with unfamiliar names when the actual appearance of the owners in these pages is still far off; it is a barefaced blunder which may well make one question the freedom of the will.  What, indeed, is free will?  I am quite aware that I have put down under a compulsion these too empty, too early names.[1]


Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947)



[1] Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of a German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 1992), pp. 179, 180.

Friday, March 1, 2024

Letter to The Globe and Mail on MAID for the mentally ill

The Editor:

My fundamental question: Are mental-health services equally available across the country?


Ontario has the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Its apparent equivalent here, the BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services, struggles for name recognition both within the province and nationally (I hadn’t heard of it until recently).

Will a person with an “irremediable” mental illness in Saskatchewan or Prince Edward Island find the same psychiatric resources as someone located in, say, Hamilton, a major university city? Why seek an escape clause for mental illness without thinking in the first place of the vast disparity in the quality of services (not) at the disposal of people? Will there be more “irremediable” cases in have-not provinces?

Mental-health resources, it seems, are far from fair across the country. So why then talk about medical assistance in dying?

Joerge Dyrkton Anmore, B.C.

 

Published in The Globe and Mail, Tuesday February 6, 2024

 

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Canadian university overseas student tuition fees as medieval “Indulgences”

 

Before the Reformation – most notably before Martin Luther – the medieval Catholic church came to accept gifts of money, or Indulgences, from peasants and religious men in return for salvation, also known as blessedness in Heaven.  The above engraving illustrates such activities by the Pope while holding an audience.

What, may I ask, is the difference between the above scenario and our present-day universities known to be so highly dependent on revenue from exorbitant external student fees?  Just like the medieval Church, Canada's universities today see themselves as offering the lucky a path to Permanent Resident status here, in other words, a route to heaven.

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Intellectual Wanderings on the History and Future of “Becoming” … Or, from Hegel to Heraclitus today

As an undergraduate I was fascinated by the idea of history as “becoming”.  At the time, the future seemed open-ended and life undetermined, that is, if we could only ignore the Cold War.  Whatever was considered as ‘present’ moved on with a sense of restlessness, certainly far more so now considering the immediacy of our digital and ‘global’ world fixated as it is on things at the moment.   But in my history classes at the time, I began to think – and maybe was invited to think - of the French and Industrial Revolutions as having unlocked the floodgates to this never-ending constancy that pervades the world today.

In my fourth year I was attracted to the thought of Henri Bergson, the world’s first ‘popular’ philosopher, who drew to Paris admiring audiences from even across the Atlantic.  His book, Creative Evolution (1907), generated considerable attention among the educated at the time.  Bergson lectured on ‘intuition’ and spoke of a life-force, or élan vital – notions that broke with the prevailing scientism and positivism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, ideas which had bolstered the secular ideals of the Third Republic. Indeed, Bergson may have helped prepare Frenchmen for a predisposition towards war in the years leading up to 1914.

Bergson was born in 1859, the same year Darwin published his Origin of the Species.  In other words, any understanding of Bergson’s “becoming” cannot be considered apart from the impact of the Englishmen Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, along with the respective Theory of Evolution and ideas on social Darwinism.  While evolution, as Darwin conceived it, is essentially nature’s mechanism of “becoming” devoid of any end purpose, Bergson offered an alternative approach to life and thought that was anti-deterministic yet, still, all about “becoming”. This nuanced connection of ideas had escaped me as an undergraduate.

If we look further, Bergson, Darwin and Spencer, each in their own way, owe a huge debt to Hegel, the last ‘universal’ thinker of the nineteenth century, a German with his own major influence on Marx, and whose philosophy of history – marked by convoluted writing - is all about “becoming”.  Some of this, too, assuredly, had eluded me as a young student.  My textbook at the time was Franklin Baumer’s Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (1977). Hegel’s idea of history, in Baumer’s words, “was never static and was characterized by change, by perpetual novelty, and by progress toward perfectibility, the nature of which, however, was still ‘undetermined.’”[1]  This essay explores some of these themes.

Parenthetically speaking, Baumer’s book, Modern European Thought, is replete with references to the idea of history as “becoming”.[2] Each individual section of the book has headings, in order: “From Being to Becoming”, “Being over Becoming”, “Being and Becoming”, “Becoming over Being”, and finally, “The Triumph of Becoming” in the twentieth century.  As an enraptured undergraduate, I subsequently applied to Harvard to study the subject. But I was not aware of its Hegelian imprint, nor of the academic significance that Baumer was an historian at Yale, who may – or may not – for my sake have adequately acknowledged the role of Hegel’s thinking in this particular work.  At any rate, I didn’t get to Harvard.  

It should come as no surprise that Hegel is simplified by Baumer, and in order to better understand Hegel’s thinking in The Philosophy of History, one needs to appreciate the context of the “World-Historical” events of the French Revolution, to which Hegel himself was a witness.   As Hegel explains: “The final goal of the world, we said, is Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom, and hence also the actualization of that very freedom.”[3] Hegel continues in much the same vein in his Philosophy of Right, where freedom serves as the foundation of right.[4]  The many events of the French Revolution can also be seen as inspiration for Hegel’s famous dialectic.   Hegel believed that every thesis – he was clearly a man of Ideas – contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, or antithesis, which in turn created an inevitable reconciliation, or synthesis.  Hegel’s own life chronicled numerous revolutionary happenings: first the Fall of the Bastille, then War, then the Terror, then the Thermidorean reaction, then Napoleonic authoritarianism and, of course, more War, and then the Restoration of the Monarchy, and so on.  One way of putting it, perhaps more politically, is that Hegel’s history looks to both “activity and retro-activity,” something that may seem more apparent to us today.[5]  Put more simply: history is – using Hegel’s words, shared by Baumer – guided by “The Principle of Development.”[6]

It is important to understand that Hegel’s thought - along with that of Marx, in part – was an expression of German Idealism and Romanticism, considered the third point in the trinity that accompanied the French and Industrial Revolutions. Later interpreted through the lens of not only the First World War, but also the Second World War, Hegel came to be disdained and was inevitably linked to the dreaded notions of a “German Becoming.”  This term is mentioned in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1948), but expressed more pointedly in Karl Popper’s chapter “Hegel and the New Tribalism” in his The Open Society and its Enemies (1945).  As a counter-example to this, keeping in mind the problem of Left Hegelianism and Right Hegelianism, we see in today’s dialectic-afflicted Canada a progressive version of Hegel as precursor to our growing multiculturalism.

This brings us to yet another idea that needs to be disentangled from the phenomenon of the nineteenth century mind: “becoming” as “progress”.  It was especially prominent among English Whigs and liberals, and historians such as Macaulay, but, as I previously indicated, it can also be found in our protean friend Hegel, who made the case for “perfectibility.”[7] Looking at England in the light of its Empire and economy, the nineteenth century – and English history in general – was considered a ‘success story’, with the Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution viewed as self-evident standouts.  Today, however, there is little wonder at the ‘strange death’ of liberalism following the Great War. With this in mind, perhaps Herbert Butterfield’s classic essay, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), should also be couched in the context of liberalism’s decline over the twentieth century. In addition, we can speculate that there may indeed be progress in science, but the idea of humanity’s inescapable moral progress seems to me rather dubious. We need only to glance about our globe in the post-Covid era. 

Here I make the conjecture that, in many ways, we seem to be returning to an era similar to the pandemic of 1918-1919, also known as the Spanish Flu.  I think of this as a kind of “re-becoming,” or “retro-activity”.  There is, for example, much the same sense of decline and degeneration particularly in the U.S.A. post 9/11 that pervaded France following its humiliation at the hands of Bismarck in 1871.  And while historical events are not known to follow each other in consecutive order, we can – broadly speaking – also compare the Great Recession of 2008 with the Great Depression that began in 1929. The economic threats to the middle classes were clearly made manifest in both instances. (Just consider, as an example, today’s friendly neighbourhood homeless count).   And both financial crises were characterized by an even greater flourishing of widespread populism that followed.  While space in the proverbial ‘middle’, as we can see, continues to be vacated, extremes are developing on both sides of the political spectrum, most notably on the Right. 

What has this digression to do with an essay on the idea of “becoming”, you may ask?  My answer is: absolutely everything!  Hegel’s “becoming” was originally born of dialectics, and, as such, may have served as the ‘middle’ in a twentieth-century, bipolar world now considered outmoded, though it is still helpful in a multi-polar universe.[8]  Darwin’s evolutionary theory as “becoming” may still resonate today, and we find it, for example, in Boris Johnson’s notion of “herd immunity,” as well as in our current batch of international conflicts.  “Becoming” considered as an inevitable form of “progress,” however, can today seem rather dim witted.  Yet we really need to appreciate how the far Right, in an effort to reinforce its own sense of “becoming,” has latched on to the pre-Socratic philosophy of Heraclitus as its intellectual cornerstone.

Heraclitus is the philosopher of universal flux, and he is perhaps best remembered for his aphorism: “The river where you set your foot just now is gone – those waters giving way to this, now this.”[9]   Another memorable maxim is: “By cosmic rule as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine./All things change./Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining of bodies die and rise again in smoke called incense.”[10] Of course, Heraclitus is admired by avatars of change, for example Nietzsche who had a similar fondness for aphorisms.  But Heraclitus also plays an essential role in the minds of the far Right, and we see this in Heidegger who draws from Heraclitus in Fragment 44: “War, as father of all things, and king, names few to serve as gods, and makes these men slaves, those free.”[11] We can also add to our considerations Fragment 43, again reminiscent of Nietzschean thinking: “The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict.”[12]

While Heidegger philosophized about Being – as opposed to “becoming,” he nonetheless attached himself onto Heraclitus’s notions of flux and war to build an understanding of our world as ‘relative’.  It is worth mentioning here that Heidegger was a meteorologist during the First World War (in a weather balloon presumably monitoring, among other things, favourable winds for gas attacks) as was Sartre in the Second World War (minus the gas).  Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) was his response to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and both titles give a nod to Hegel.[13]  In Sartre we see existentialism as “becoming” – yet another variation on our theme today – where man creates nothing but himself by means of self-projection.[14]  In effect, man is responsible for himself, and in so doing he avoids falling into the abyss of ‘absurdity’.   

Sartre’s famous lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism (1945), as the title indicates, places his philosophy within the humanist tradition unlike his almost-as-celebrated intellectual successors, Derrida and Foucault – and postmodernism in general.  The postmodernist debt to anti-humanist figures like Heidegger – and to the flux in Heraclitus – has been uncovered in a series of works by the intellectual historian Richard Wolin.[15]  Thanks to his research (and I concur from my own readings) it now appears evident that postmodernist French philosophy on the Left owes a great deal to early antimodernist fin-de-siècle philosophers and thinkers on the Right.

What are the implications of all this? If our formative philosophers consider each and every thing to be in flux, or as relative, then (to use Derrida’s term, which has been co-opted by the Right) everything can be “deconstructed”, including our constitutional liberties. There is, in other words, no core, and like an onion one can – or even should, it appears, peel away all the layers to behold nothingness. In effect, this means there is no truth. No one can have knowledge.  What, then, is the difference between right and wrong? If Foucault is correct, then knowledge is just a function of power.

But Western democracy was founded on the intellectual fulcrum of the 17th and 18th centuries: the science of Newton’s physics and Locke’s so-called ‘liberal’ (yet still empirical) concept of political rule as based on the consent of the people.  However, French philosophers of late appear to neglect the role of the Scientific Revolution.[16]  Instead they harken back to Descartes, a rationalist, while those in Britain look to Francis Bacon, an experimental thinker.  There is a significant difference here.  Nowadays, Newton has since ceded ground to Darwin, who does not account for fundamental changes in Nature – as seen in the anticipated “becoming” of our climate.  Meanwhile a great many people on the Right nowadays seem enraptured by “Relativity”.  Perhaps not incidentally, Heraclitus is seen – in a stretch - to anticipate Einstein’s famous understanding of Energy in Fragment 22: “… all things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls back into things.”[17]

At this point I would like to make the case that the idea of Newtonian harmony, prefaced as it was by the scientific discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, served to underscore an Enlightenment (and enlightened) appreciation for constitutional structures of governance.  If the universe has rules, then they could also be applied to guide our political forms.  We see this emerging, in part, in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). We see this even more concretely in the French Revolution when prominent figures in the events were actual astronomers by profession, for example Jean Sylvain Bailly, who led the famous Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789).  And we see it, of course, in the revolutionary formation and institutions of the United States of America, as declared in 1776. But take away the Enlightenment, and we not only have anti-Enlightenment thinking, beginning for example with Foucault’s noted Berkeley Lecture in 1983,[18] but we also now have as a consequence anti-constitutionalism along with the rise of autocratic strongmen today: Putin, Xi, Trump, you name them.

Science formed the epistemological framework for the Enlightenment and democracy as we understand it.  But how does one contend with Right-wing paradigms which prefer to draw from the Theories of Evolution and Relativity, and which at the same time are bolstered by Heraclitus’s visions of a warring flux?   One answer is to be more ardent about Science, to learn of its origins, its impacts on democratic thought (Locke, for example was a physician), and its many great modern-day applications (as I sit and type on my laptop computer).  In effect, we need to go beyond Darwin and Einstein as they are popularly conceived.  Another answer is not to lose vision of the value and possibility of Truths, if not the Truth.  While a Truth may not be absolute, we should remain receptive to the idea that some Truths are undeniably more True than other Truths. 

Yet another answer may be to turn to Aristotle, who famously countered the principle of flux with his own “Law of Contradiction”.[19]  Aristotle explains in The Metaphysics: “it is certainly the case that there are some philosophers who hold both that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be and that it is possible for us to entertain beliefs to that effect.”[20]  He goes on to say: “the same thing cannot at the same time both be and not be, and indeed we have gone on to show that this is the securest of all principles.”[21] In other words, Truth possibly lies somewhere between two contradictions, and as such Aristotle – in his outsized and influential way - may have stimulated Hegel’s philosophical oeuvre, among that of a great many others.

This returns me to my undergraduate days. I chose to study History and Philosophy because my thinking was backwards. In other words, I knew what I didn’t like. The same goes for “Truth”: if I find a proposition to be highly disagreeable, then I seek an opposite path … until I meet yet another contradiction.  Truth is not in flux, but it may be arrived at, if Hegel is correct, by an endless series of contradictions.  So ends my brief history of “becoming.”

 



[1] Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 299.

[2] Ibid.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, tr. Leo Rauch (Cambridge: Hackett, 1988), p. 22.  Emphasis by Hegel.

[4] Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 58.

[5] Emile Faguet, Initiation into Philosophy, Indo-European Publishing. Reprint, p. 117.  The sentence reads as, in part: “the becoming is not a river which flows; activity is activity and retro-activity.” See also Emile Faguet, Initiation Philosophique (Paris: Hachette, 1918), p. 143.

[6] Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, p. 58.  Baumer, Modern European Thought, p. 299.

[7] Hegel, Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’, p. 57.

[8] See, for example, Chapter 4 “The Hegelian Middle” in Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). See also Susan M. Dodd and Neil G. Robertson, Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

[9] Heraclitus, Fragments, tr. Brooks Haxton (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p.  27.

[10] Ibid., p. 25.

[11] Ibid., p. 29.  See Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 7 and p. 269.

[12] Heraclitus, Fragments, p. 29.

[13] See for example Michael Moran, Metaphysical Imagination and Other Essays on Philosophy and Modern European Mind (Peterborough, England: Fastprint, 2018), p. 240.

[14] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, tr. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 37.

[15] As previously mentioned: Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).  See also Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

[16] Michael Moran, Metaphysical Imagination and Other Essays, p. 640.

[17] Heraclitus, Fragments, p. 15.

[18] See Michel Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 2010).  Note the concluding words: “I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment: I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.” (p. 50).

[19] Also known as the Law of Non-Contradiction. See George Couvalis, “Aristotle on Non-Contradiction,” Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial International Conference on Greek Studies (Flanders 2009), online.

[20] Aristotle, The Metaphysics, tr. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), p. 89.  See Book Beta 1006a.

[21] Ibid., p. 89. Emphasis is in the original translated text.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Bombed last night ... refrains from the First World War.

 

'The Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt' (1917)

Bombed last night, bombed the night before,
Gonna get bombed tonight if we never get bombed no more
When we’re bombed we’re scared as we can be,
Oh God damn the bombing planes from Germany.

They’re over us, they’re over us,
One shell hole for the four of us.
Glory be to God that the three of us can run,
Cause no one of us could fill it all alone.

Gassed last night, gassed the night before,
Gonna get gassed again if we never get gassed no more.
When we’re gassed we’re sick as we can be,
Cause phosgene and mustard gas are much too much for me.

They’re warning us, they’re warning us,
One respirator for the four of us.
Glory be to God that the three of us can run,
Cause one of us can use it all alone
.[1]


 



[1] Stuart Robson, The First World War (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 102,103.