Category: Heidegger

Alienation, Critical Theory, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, Juergen Habermas, Leo Strauss, Nietzsche

The Anti-Apocalypse of Being
Francis Bacon, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope (1952)

Themes of alienation, vacuity, and absurdity have permeated the art and literature of the late twentieth century. From Samuel Beckett, to Mark Rothko, Marcel Duchamp, Brett Easton-Ellis, Salvador Dali, and Albert Camus, there appears to be a recognition of something misdirected, misaligned, out of whack. It’s political, social, economic, and even aesthetic – the artists themselves often recognise the futility of even their own art. What has been missing is – naturally – hard to pin down; but there is something essential about it, something epistemic. The resultant failures of society to compensate, despite eager, youthful, soviet-style enthusiastic promises of progress and improvement, merely accelerate the retrenchment of people from the public sphere, from the political, and into the familiar space of the self, and the narcissistic selfie. If this is wrong, if this is not right, or not how it should be, what happened to us?

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AI, Alienation, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Technology, theology

Falling Down

In Martin Heidegger‘s Being and Time, he refers to verfallen as a characteristic of being, or dasein. It means fallen-ness, or falling prey, an acknowledgement that we do things not because we want to do them, but because we must; we act in particular ways, we fall into line, we do jobs, have families, get a mortgage and a pension, obey the law and so on. We consciously engage with the systems and societies into which we have found ourselves. It is surprising how frequently this concept of ‘the fall’ emerges in philosophy, theology and popular culture.

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Art, Heidegger, Uncategorized

Two Theories of Art

The recent BBC revisiting of the history of art – Civilisations – is fascinating for its juxtaposition against the 1969 predecessor by Kenneth Clark. The new version tries to be genuinely global, post-imperial, and generally woke, so to speak. However, it doesn’t quite get to the philosophy of the creative act, the artistic imperative. The series grapples with consequences and politics, with religion and hierarchy, but not really with any philosophy of art, or questions of meaning. The interpretations of Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuzes, while diametrically opposed in some ways, are illuminating on the subject.

Heidegger’s view (specifically on Modern Art) was that it was essentially destructive. In a 1956 Der Spiegel interview, published after his death ten years later, he argued that just as philosophers could not prescribe a new condition for humanity to confront modernity, art had no suitable perspective from which to contribute. Art in essence, as I read his comments, compounded the inherent entrapment of the modern, further distancing us from our essence, or being.

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Alienation, Artificial Intelligence, Bewilderment, Carl Schmitt, Critical Theory, Ecology, Environment, Hayek, Heidegger, Juergen Habermas, neoliberalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of SCience, Political Theology, Uncategorized

Machine Generated Illusions of Intimacy

Later this week I’m speaking to the UCC conference on Eco-cosmology, Sustainability and a Spirit of Resilience, on the subject of ‘Machine Generated Illusions of Intimacy’, about the challenges of modernity and computational epistemology. Here’s a sneak peak.

Bewilderment, Church, Cold War, EU, Europe, Greece, Hayek, Heidegger, Inequality, Juergen Habermas, Philosophy, Religion, Technology

The Lost Soul of Europe
Clyfford Still's 1944-N No. 2
Clyfford Still’s 1944-N No. 2. For Still, art was dead in the aftermath of World War II, for it was based on European ‘dogma, authority, tradition. The totalitarian hegemony of this tradition I despise, its presumptions I reject’ (MOMA)

What has happened to Europe? What of our glorious post-war project to bring together our cultured peoples after centuries of war, that brave experiment not merely in statecraft, but in post-state statecraft, to redefine government, and seize peace to our hearts? It has persevered and grown for over sixty years, launching exuberantly into the new Millennium with the Euro, but now she finds herself beset on all sides by vast forces including geopolitics, security, technology and global finance. Worst of all, Europe seems to have lost its soul. Not merely its raison d’etre, but its spirit, its ambition. What is missing?

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Alienation, Bewilderment, Critical Theory, Ecology, Fukuyama, Hayek, Heidegger, Karl Marx, Philosophy, Technology

Progress and Technology

Heidegger_1955
Martin Heidegger: We talk as if humans are actually in charge of things, but we’re not.

Do you know what progress means? Do you know what technology is? Many elements of cultural structure have been so consistent and unchallenged now for so many years that we may have landed in a kind of intellectual stupor. Our self-awareness has dissipated, and our alienation has become so complete that we have almost become meta-brands, brands of brands, images of images, pictures of pictures. Our pandemic mimesis denies innovation and inspiration, and only increases the penalty for deviance, or perversion. Self-knowledge has become a curse, something denies us membership of society, leading us to post-truth, and ‘fake news’.

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