Walking through Old Montreal with my Mother, popping into galleries filled with 5000$ paintings (and people buying them!), we came across the strangest store. Called “Hyper-Stylish Books and Objects”, it was superficially a book store. But, unlike any book store I’d ever seen before – all of the books were wrapped in plastic. So, you [...]
Archive for the ‘Being’ Category
“Hyperstylish Objects” and Things
Posted in Being, Ethics, Philosophy, Things on October 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Values
Posted in Being, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, global warming on September 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
We all have them. They’re what drive us, what we strive for. What we sometimes have to give up. What we set up as provisional ideals, goals, projects. What guide us through difficult decisions. What we ponder over. What we die for (or from).
When our ideals differ from those of others, we have values for [...]
Point Roberts – International Boundary Vacation Zone
Posted in Being, Ethics, Pragmatics on August 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Last weekend I had the good fortune to be invited to a friend’s beachhouse in Point Roberts, just across the border from Twassen, British Columbia. The border, viewed from Google Maps is quite a distinctive sight – full modern development on the north side gives way to 50’s beach houses and forest cover just south [...]
Summer Ponderings, Existential Crisis, Meaning and Purpose
Posted in Being, Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, God, Philosophy, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning, global warming on August 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Back in touch”
This summer I have not spent much time reading and writing. In other words, I have not done much philosophy. I’ve found myself wondering, “What is the point of philosophy?”, “What is philosophy for?”. Of course, easy and bad answers to these questions exist. The usual solution is to posit some principle which [...]
Form inside matter
Posted in Art, Being, Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, beginning on June 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The AGO currently has an exhibit in its Italian gallery of beams of wood carved away to reveal the heartwood. Literally starting with a building material, the artist is able to reveal the tree inside it – in other words, in something whose form has been neutralized, made identical (one beam is the same as [...]
Serra’s Shift
Posted in Being, Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Photography, Picturesque, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning, global warming on June 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Yesterday morning my father, myself, and a few roomates and friends piled into my new one dollar van to drive north of Toronto to see Richard Serra’s early site-specific work, “Shift”. Although I first heard about the piece four years ago in a course on late Heidegger, a lack of private transportation meant this was [...]
Heidegger’s Nietzsche Volume 1: The New Interpretation of the Sensuous. P212-213
Posted in Being, Philosophy, Things, beginning on May 14, 2009 | 7 Comments »
“The sensuous in itself is directed towards overview and order, toward what can be mastered and firmly fixed”
The sensuous is form engendering – it finds in itself a “direction” towards abstraction, idea, for the sake of getting a hold on, fixing. The sensuous grasps and calcifies, sediments. The direction is towards enhancement as an increase [...]
Can a Philosopher have friends?
Posted in Being, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Pragmatics, beginning on April 26, 2009 | 20 Comments »
It’s been contested on occasion, to myself at least, that spending the majority of one’s time learning to think the thoughts of obscure German philosophers makes one think in a way unintelligible to normal people – or even worse, might distort one’s moral character beyond recognition. While I don’t think this is right, it’s not [...]
What is Representation?
Posted in Art, Being, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Picturesque, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning on April 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
What is Representation, how does the WTP turn truth into a value, and how does the inadequacy of that value require another value, and what does this allow us to say about the essence of Art?
Representation is not, at least in its purest form, the determination of the manifold of intuition as an object, [...]
“The Highest Values as Categories”
Posted in Being, Capitalism, Ethics, Technology, beginning, writing on March 12, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Concerning Nietzsche 4, page 40.
How we encounter things is contingent upon how we orient ourselves towards them. Because we encounter things as existing for-themselves, as self-standing on their own, we can say of them that they are a “thing”, i.e. a door. The counterfactual implication being, if we did not encounter things as standing-on-their-own, we [...]
