The naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art. Through art, the predicament of self becomes not only speakable but laughable. Helen Keller and any two-year-old and Kafka’s friends laughed when the unnameable was named. Kafka and his friends laughed when he read his stories…
Yet they, the lay scientists, those who perceive themselves in the community of scientists and at some remove from the ordinary world, may be better off than those who live immanent lives, beneficiaries of science and technology, but with only a glimmering of the scientists, the glimmering that there are scientists and that “they” know…
Self as Transcendent. In a post-religious age, the only transcendence open to the self is self-transcendence, that is, the transcending of the world by the self. The available modes of transcendence in such an age are science and art. 00000 Reentry problems become noticeable in less inspired scientists. The divorced wife of an astronomer at the…
As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises. One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which…
Born on this day existentialismphilosophical literatureWalker Percy
I will not try to decide here whether what the word apple conjures up in your mind, its signifié, is a percept or a concept, because it is somewhere in between, A percept refers to an individual apple. A concept is an abstraction from all apples, a definition of apple. But the signifié of apple…
The signal-using organism has an environment. The sign-user has an environment, but it also has a world. The environment of an organism is those elements of the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly (Saturn does not) and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many…
I’ve listened to pretty much all of Joe’s podcasts as I have to Jordan’s: independently they are superb but together they bring out the absolute best in each other. I didn’t think that anything could top their first meeting but they did exactly that in this their second. They are the instantiation of Oakeshott’s metaphor of conversation…
But what has been called into question in these and like experiments is the use of words such as language, symbols, sentences to describe this kind of communication. Investigators such as Terrace and Sebeok have shown that such communication does not bear the test of language in the human sense, e.g., having a rule-governed syntax.…
Over the past few months I’ve been listening closely to Heathen and haven’t tired of it at all, despite some minor annoyances. Echoing many others, the interesting thing about this album is that Bowie, finally and for once, consistently makes good on closing out the amazing legacy of his golden years (1970-1980). Heathen (see a couple of…
manwithoutqualities 