Heidegger on Holderlin- part II

Holderlin ends his poem 'Homecoming' by saying that the poet has to take care to craft his poem. But others don't have to take care deciphering the poem. Their appreciation of it should be blithe and care-free.

Similarly, we expect a savant or an inventor or a cook or a craftsmen to take great pains with their work. But we want to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor without any further labour of our own. I want my computer to work. I don't want to know about the technical details about how it works.

There are some degenerate research programs where, no matter how hard you work or how much you puzzle your brain, you can't achieve anything because what you are doing is silly. All you can do is endlessly explain why the thing is so difficult and yet so important precisely because if only it could be done then everything else could also be done- including getting pigs to fly.

Heidegger makes heavy weather of everything he reflects upon because he thinks devoting your life to silliness isn't silly.

This is what he thinks should happen when a poet, returned home, recites a poem at the family dinner table-

Who are "the others" to whom the abrupt "not" is spoken? The poem which closes in this way begins with the ambiguous dedication "To Kindred Ones." But why should the "homecoming" first be spoken to the countrymen, who have been in the homeland forever? The homecoming poet is met by the hurried greeting of his countrymen. They seem to be kindred to him, but they are not yet so—i.e., not related to him, the poet. But assuming that the "others" named at the end are those who are first to become the poet's kindred ones, why does the poet explicitly exclude them from the singer's care?

This is silly. When you return to your small town there are hurried greetings with acquaintances. Nobody stops you for a long chat because they know you are anxious to get home to kiss Mummy and hug Daddy and so forth.
The poet may recite a poem at the dinner table. He has taken care over it but those who listen to it do so in a carefree manner. A younger sister may tease him about it. Mum will frown but secretly be glad. Poetry is all very well, but a job with the Municipality would be better.  Of course, it is always possible that the poem isn't a dreary lucubration. If your own family thinks it good then you are on to something. This could be breakthrough you've been looking for.

The abrupt "not" does indeed release "the others" from the care of the poetic saying, but it in no way releases them from the care of listening to what "the poets meditate or sing" here in "Homecoming."

Bullshit! If others have to puzzle over your poem then you are a shite poet. Consider a career move into Cost and Management Accountancy.

The "not" is the mysterious call "to" the others in the fatherland, to become listeners, so that for the first time they may learn to know the essence of the homeland.

Holderlin already inhabited what Goethe called 'World Literature'- anyone anywhere could access the essence of Greek 'Kalokagathia' or French 'esprit' or English 'humour' by reading the acclaimed poets of those countries.

 Heidegger is relegating this school chum of Schelling and Hegel's to the illiterate Germania of Tacitus. He is turning a scholar-poet who translated Sophocles into a rhapsodist for some rustic branch of the Hitler Youth.

"The others" must first learn to reflect upon the mystery of the reserving nearness.

Why? Even if this makes for better poetry- which is the business of the poet- how does it make for better carpentry or ditch digging?

Such thinking first forms the thoughtful ones, who do not hasten by that precious find which has been reserved and committed into the words of the poem. Out of these thoughtful ones will come the patient ones of a lasting spirit, which itself again learns to persist in the still-enduring absence of the god. Only the thoughtful ones and the patient ones are the careful ones. Because they think of what is composed in the poem, they are turned with the singer's care toward the mystery of the reserving nearness. Through this single devotion to the same theme, the careful listeners are related to the speaker's care; they are "the others," the poet's true "kindred spirits."

Heidegger is saying that he himself is Holderlin's 'kindred'- a plausible claim because Holderlin received a philosophical education uncommon amongst poets of the first rank. His mental illness gives his work an oracular 'outsider' quality which Rilke and Celan found inspiring. But does Heidegger really rise to the poetic heights of either? Is he really reading Holderlin or is he reading himself into something utterly alien to him- viz. a henotheistic Pietist's cautious raptures?

Perhaps, there is a political angle to Heidegger's misprision. Holderlin wrote the poem in 1801 on returning home from Switzerland. The French had just beaten the Second Coalition. Napoleon had won the battle of Hohenlinden in Bavaria. Holderlin, the student of Fichte, would naturally conceive 'care for the fatherland' as a duty to defend it and preserve its ethos.

It is certainly possible to read 'Homecoming' in this way. Soldiers return home on leave. Those 'on the home front' have their own worries. But, for a moment, there is a respite from care. There is a banquet. There is good cheer. There is oratory. There is song. Divine protection is collectively sought. But there are also individual, private, acts of- not desertion, not headlong flight- but 'internal migration', the seeking of a private armistice, a mental demobilization and return to childhood's tranquil havens.

Germany's frontiers had to contract, its Army had to turn to shit- they now do rifle drill with broomsticks painted black- before the Heimat of Holderlin became safe from its Hitlers. Heidegger's Holderlin was one danger that Heimat had to escape- or rather gratefully permit Occupying Powers to beat out of its pedants and pundits.

Shit Academic Departments- Literature, Philosophy, Social fucking Anthropology etc- may need the nitwit Heidegger to explain why their incessant polishing of the silver and setting of the table 'creates a space' for a Barmecidal feast which some future God will turn into real meat and real wine. But this has nothing to do with poetry- which either pleases the public or eases the plight of the poet. It is one thing to be unloved. It is another to be loveless. A poem is a placeholder for the heart. It may become part of world literature, as Holderlin's poem has done, because the God we want has a place for the mad, the sad & the too thouroghgoingly dull to dignify as bad.

Heidegger on Holderlin- Part I

 Holderlin's ' "Homecoming/And the kindred ones' invokes Alpine scenery to describe a rapturous homecoming down the mountains to one's home in a little island town on a beautiful lake. It begins with a 'cloud composing poetry full of joy' and ends with the singer himself who must take much care with his art though those he has returned to need not bother. Part of that careful Art has to do with converse with the 'Blissful god rejoicing' on high, who 'seems inclined to create joy', sending true good fortune to towns and houses. This is done through knowledge of creatures as well as skill in measure- in other words, the poet is like God when his care is to endow joy- more particularly in the context of returning home to one's kindred.

What does Heidegger make of this simple and heartfelt poem?

those who "have cares in the fatherland" are not yet ready to receive the homeland's very own peculiar character, "the German," as their own possession. Therefore what constitutes the homecoming is that the countrymen must first become at home in the still withheld essence of their homeland—indeed; even prior to this, that the "dear ones" at home must first learn how to become at home. For this it is necessary to know in advance what is the homeland's own specific nature and what is best in it. But how should we ever find this, unless a seeker is there for us, and the sought-for essence of the homeland shows itself to him?

This is nonsense. God does the needful at the appointed time and in the proper measure.  When he renews the seasons, the creative one, refreshes And seizes the silent hearts of aging men, And works down to the depths, and opens and brightens up, As he loves to do, and now once again a life begins, Grace blooms, as once, and present spirit comes, And a joyous courage spreads its wings once more.
The poet speaks with God, asking grace for his loved ones and his fatherland because that is what poets do. It is their special care.
Much I spoke to him, for whatever poets meditate Or sing", it mostly concerns the angels and him; Much I asked for, for love of the fatherland, lest Unbidden one day the spirit might suddenly fall upon us; Much also for you, who have cares in the fatherland, To whom holy thanks, smiling, brings the fugitives, Countrymen! for you, meanwhile the lake rocked me, And the boatman sat calmly and praised the journey.
No doubt, there are Kings or even just Heads of households who 'have cares in the fatherland' but they are of a different sort from the cares of the poet. Running the economy of Lindau represents one type of labor. Finding beautiful words to praise it requires a different type of worry and preoccupation. Holderlin effectively showcases Lindau as a gateway along a beautiful and romantic trade route of great antiquity. But he also speaks of sharing what he has learnt of God with the stay-at-home Mother.
. O voice of the town, of my mother! O you touch me, you stir up what I learned long ago! Yet they are still the same! Still the sun and joy blossom for you, 0 you dearest ones! And almost more brightly in your eyes than before. Yes! Old things are still the same! They thrive and ripen, yet nothing Which lives and loves there abandons its faithfulness. But the best, the real find, which lies beneath the rainbow Of holy peace, is reserved for young and old. 1 talk like a fool. It is joy. Yet tomorrow and in the future When we go outside and look at the living fields, Beneath the tree's blossoms, in the holidays of spring, Much shall I talk and hope with you about this, dear ones! Much have I heard about the great father and have Long kept silent about him, who refreshes wandering time In the heights above, and reigns over mountain ranges, Who will soon grant us heavenly gifts and call For brighter song and send many good spirits. 

The poet, looking forward to the joyful family supper, is humbled by the imitatio Dei of his own calling- When we bless the meal, whom shall I name and when we Rest from the life of day, tell me, how shall I give thanks? Shall I name the high one then? A god does not love what is unfitting, To grasp him, our joy is almost too small. Often we must be silent; holy names are lacking, Hearts beat and yet talk holds back?
But these are the small cares of the poet. We know he will give joy. Yet it is delightful that, like his kindred, he is abashed by the thought of what a great joy it is that he imparts and he but a humble vessel. This is a reverse theodicy. Human joy- even such joy as characterizes a humble homecoming- is so great it justifies Man's creation of Gods with such profound depths that, of such overbrimming joy that is poured out, nothing goes to waste.

Heidegger takes a very different view. He does not see a poet doing what poets do- viz. attribute their own actions to what they observe- e.g. seeing a cloud as composing joyful poetry-

Within the Alps it is still bright night and the cloud,

Composing poems full of joy, covers the yawning valley within.

Instead he sees something stupid and pedantic which he put there himself. 

Joyfulness is composed into a poem.

No it isn't. Where in the world will you find a poem which has the property of making you joyful at the very moment you observe your Mommy or your Baby dying in horrible pain?
We are dealing with a poetic conceit- that is all.

The joyful is tuned by joy into joy.

No. Bullshit is tuned into bullshit by bullshit on Wednesday afternoons between 2 and 4 p.m in the Old Lecture Hall during this semester.

In this way it is what is rejoiced in, and equally what rejoices. And this again can bring joy to others. So the joyful is at the same time that which brings joy. The cloud "within the Alps" drifts upward toward the "silvery heights." It opens itself up to the lofty brightness of the heavens, while at the same time it "covers" "the yawning valley." The cloud lets itself be seen from the open brightness. The cloud composes poetry.

Why? Fuck is wrong with it? Why not compose music or do Trigonometry or write some worthless pseudo Mystic shite?

Because it looks straight into that which gazes upon it in return, its poem is not idly invented or contrived.

Which great poem was composed while 'looking straight into that which gazes upon it in return'? None I know of. Love poems call to mind the beloved. No lover ever said 'hold still dear. Look directly at me while I compose a poem about how sexy you are.' That's not how romance works.

To compose is to find.

No. It is to compose. Did Heidegger never lose his keys or his spectacles? Fuck was his major malfunction?

Accordingly, the cloud must reach out beyond itself toward something other than itself.

But composing a poem does not involve finding anything. It is merely '...Nature to advantage dress'd. What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind
So, in the opinion of a genuine poet- one whom Kant knew long passages of by heart- there is no seeking anterior to the 'finding'. The thing is simultaneous. No 'chorismos' obtains.

It does not generate the theme of its poem.

But only because clouds don't actually generate poems either.

The theme does not come out of the cloud.

It came out of a pedant's pedantic brain.

It comes over the cloud, as something that the cloud awaits.

But that's not what Holderlin said. Heidegger is composing his own poem about a cloud which wants to be a poet but can't coz of Existentialism or because Germans haven't yet grasped their historic destiny or some other such shite. It then decides to switch to basket-weaving as its Major. But, basket-weaving is over-subscribed.

The cloud waits in an open brightness that gladdens the waiting. The cloud is cheered in this gladness. What it composes, the joyful, is gaiety. We also call it the cheerful, but from now on we have to use this word in a strict sense: what has been cleared and brightened up. What has been cleared in this way has had a space freely made for it, illuminated and put in order.

Husserl started off as the protege of a quite good Mathematician. Everyone was talking about Hilbert Spaces and Banach spaces and Finsler spaces and so Phenomenology got stuck with the idea that Spaces are real important. To this day, cretins talk of creating a space for some shite or the other. But absent topological 'holes' or unless an 'inner product' is lacking, Spaces don't matter. We can just collapse them back into a time series.

Look at the following shite-

Only gaiety, that which has been cleared and brightened up in this
manner, is able to place everything in its proper place.

Fuck off! When was the last time 'gaiety' occurred after 'clearing and brightening and putting everything in its proper place'? On the contrary, plenty of gaiety occurs when a mess is made and everybody ends up wearing each other's underwear.

The joyful has its being in the gaiety that brightens.

No. The joyful has its being in being very very fucking happy. Mary Poppins may be very gay as the darts around the place brightening things and the kids may say 'that was fun', but fun is not joyfulness.

But gaiety itself appears only in that which gives joy, that which delights.

No. Gaiety may contribute to the feeling that one is having a good time. It may distract one from worries. But joyfulness is something qualitatively different. We can imagine Churchill being entertained by the spontaneous gaiety of a witty young debutante. For a moment he forgets his cares and worries. But he is only joyful when he hears that Heidegger's Fuhrer has been annihilated.

Gaiety is not joy. The Angels- the word means messenger in Greek- bring tidings of joy. They don't foster gaiety or mirth or recreation.

Heidegger, stupid pedant that he is, has convinced himself that first you have to have gay angels, then a space is decluttered, then joy occurs. Sadness is verboten! It is your duty to be joyful for- Kraft durch Freude- Strength comes through Joy. Then that Strength should be used to fuck up everybody else's happiness.

 Those who offer the greeting of gaiety are the messengers, the "angels." That is why the poet, while greeting what is joyful in the homeland and comes to meet him, invokes in "Homecoming" the "angels of the house" and the "angels of the year."

One's little town may not afford much in the way of gaiety. Mum and Dad may not exactly rival the Algonquin Club in their wit. But there is joy in coming home. Not gaiety. Joy.

 Here "the house" means the space opened up for a people as a place in which they can be "at home," and thereby fulfill their proper destiny.

Well, we know what the proper destiny for Germany turned out to be. Nothing wrong with gemutlich comforts and kissing Mum and hugging Dad and playing with Rover and then going across town to see big Sister who, joy beyond joy!, has a little baby. What's more her husband turns out to be a thoroughly decent fellow who lends you a couple of quid to get in a round.

This space is bestowed by the inviolate earth.

No it isn't. The earth does not care who resides where. It is not the case that an earthquake is bound to swallow up the armies of a foreign invader.

The earth houses the peoples in their historical space.

No. People build houses on the Earth. History is a time series, not a space.

The earth brightens up "the house." Thus the brightening earth is the first angel "of the house

Wow! Heidegger didn't know that it is the Sun that 'brightens' the Earth. He thought it lights itself up so as to enable its tenants to get to work coz Arbeit macht Frei right?

The truth is quite different. Everybody knows Mummy is the first angel of the house. Except Mummy who thinks it is Baby. This is a delicious disputation with tidings of comfort and joy for all who call it to mind though wearily trudging towards a home which is where but night falls on the path.

Freud & Husserl

Freud, as the Moses of a vast continent of a Consciousness that is Un

& Husserl, who supposes one as unalloyed as the Sun,

Choose explicitly Aryan heirs in Heidegger and in Jung

'Twixt two thieves, as a beggar, the Logos is hung.

George Steiner on 'The poetry of thought'

A metaphor is merely a figure of speech. It may be suggestive and illuminating. But, if it is taken to be a fact about the world and another fact about the world is deduced from it, then the resulting 'meta-metaphor' can egregiously mislead.

Speaking metaphorically we may say 'Thought is a Language'. It isn't true but there may be some context in which this is a useful thing to say. One example is if you make a living peddling a 'talking cure' for trauma or neurosis. The notion is that nice words can make naughty thoughts go away.

What happens if you take the metaphor for a concrete fact? You may then say, in Language there is something more or less prestigious which is called Poetry. Thus Thought too must have Poetry. What would that involve?

The problem here is that most poetry is mediated by thought. It may be that a spontaneous cry- such as that attributed to the Sage Valmiki on seeing one of a pair of love-birds killed- is poetry without any mediating thought. But all subsequent 'shlokas' were mediated by a thoughtful adherence to a poetic form. Some may feel more spontaneous or 'mantic' than others. But this does not mean they aren't 'artful' or the product of a lifetime of considered thought.

The thoughts of poets composing poetry constitute the 'poetry of thought'. It is not the case that either Language or Thought exist independently of the beings who use language or think thoughts.

What happens if one assumes this is not the case? What happens when a savant commits to the concrete reality of a mere 'meta-metaphor'?

The answer is that you get an ex falso quodlibet explosion of nonsense. Consider George Steiner's 'The poetry of thought' (2011)

What are the philosophic concepts of the deaf-mute? What are his or her metaphysical imaginings? 

It is believed that Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is the first professional philosopher who is deaf. Her philosophical concepts and 'metaphysical imaginings' are as good or bad as that of any of her contemporaries.

It may be that, as more philosophy is done in Sign Language, new concepts and methods of argumentation take root in philosophy. But this also happens when there is contact with foreign schools of philosophy or indigenous religious traditions which are not mainstream.

Husserl thought there could be a 'science of philosophy'- phenomenology- which could say something about consciousness independent of anything empirical. But phenomenology never got round to say anything worth hearing. By contrast the Gastronomy of the Science of the Music of Socioproctological Philosophy says really smart things all the time- but only when nobody is listening. This is the answer to Husserl's question- 'What can remain, if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?' 

Steiner, however, is not concerned with Pure Consciousness but Language. 

All philosophic acts, every attempt to think thought, with the possible exception of formal (mathematical) and symbolic logic, are irremediably linguistic.

No. They may be purely pictorial or plastic. A 'philosophical' act may be expressible technologically or architecturally or purely by a gesture. There is a story of Kalidasa winning a philosophical debate which consisted only of silent gestures. This was in a context where a 'mudra' represented a particular theological proposition.

This is not to say that natural language can't be the meta-language for any formal language. But it isn't the only one. For any specific purpose, we can formulate a purely physical 'meta-language' such that any given 'philosophical act' has a material implementation. Indeed, an Enterprise Head may say 'we must change our philosophy is such and such way' and approve a particular set of policies as the proper implementation of what she envisages. The same holds true in interior decoration or martial arts or any number of 'high value adding' professions.

The only things which are 'irremediably linguistics' are things which have no importance outside language. A poet may tinker endlessly with a panegyric to some wholly worthless patron. A verbose pedant may endlessly polish a turd like the following -

They (i.e. philosophical acts) are realized and held hostage by one motion or another of discourse, of encoding in words and in grammar.

This is simply untrue. An Intuition may be a philosophical act and, arguably, every philosophical act cashes out as an intuition. It is certainly possible that some algorithmic process can simulate or otherwise 'express' an intuition. But, unless P=NP, it will never be the case that 'intuition' will have an encoding in 'words and in grammar'. Thus, Philosophy can't possibly be held 'hostage' by any motion of 'discourse' any more than Eating or Shitting or anything else we can talk about is held hostage by Language.

Be it oral or written, the philosophic proposition, the articulation and communication of argument are subject to the executive dynamics and limitations of human speech. 

Fuck does 'executive dynamics' mean? Nothing at all. It is the sort of name a bogus Business Consultancy might give itself.

Nothing, including human speech, is limited by human speech coz a witty and well timed fart can always puncture the baloon of any fine talker.

It may be that there lurks within all philosophy, almost certainly within all theology, an opaque but insistent desire — Spinoza's conatus — to escape from this empowering bondage. 

It is more likely that all philosophy is stupid. That is its conatus. The thing may be instrumentalized as part of an credentialist Ponzi scheme and thus a few people may make a little money teaching it. I personally think of it as a type of 'displacement activity'. Smart people may indulge in it when their research project hits a wall. The thing may not be wholly useless. It could result in finding a different approach to proving the same thing- e.g. the Intuitionist program in Maths or Revealed Preference in Econ- and this may be helpful later down the line.

I suppose there are writers who know they are writing badly because they are resorting to cliches. They still want to write but don't want to do so in 'bondage' to something they nevertheless feel was 'empowering'. So they may try to find new bottles for old wine by writing a manifesto and claiming to represent some startlingly avant garde literary movement. But this is merely a question of fashion. 

Either by modulating natural language into the tautological exactitudes, transparencies and verifiabilities of mathematics (this cold but ardent dream haunts Spinoza, Husserl, Wittgenstein)

all of whom failed. Still, Spinoza was a nice guy who was saying 'be nice'. We can respect that. But Husserl and Wittgenstein were not even wrong. Maths moved on while they were writing ponderous nonsense.

or, more enigmatically, by reverting to intuitions prior to language itself.

But, if those intuitions are about language they can't be prior to it.

We do not know that there are any such, that there can be thought before saying.

Yes we do. I had a thought while walking in the park about how to get a better return on my paltry savings. I had to spend some time on Google before I could put the thing into words. I had correctly intuited that there must be some sort of financial product which answered to my needs. But I didn't know what it was called or where I could buy it.

We all have 'Eureka' moments which, however, we can't put into words immediately. We are constantly saying 'I've had a thought. Damn! How do I put into words?'  Often, it turns out our 'Eureka' was simply nonsense. Or so we are lead to believe by a Society which institutionalizes contempt for the feeble mental powers of Iyers.

We apprehend manifold strengths of meaning, figurations of sense in the arts, in music.

Especially when we are smoking cannabis.

The inexhaustible significance of music, its defiance of translation or paraphrase, presses on philosophic scenarios in Socrates, in Nietzsche.

But it also presses on stupid potheads.

But when we adduce the "sense" of aesthetic representations and musical forms, we are metaphorizing, we are operating by more or less covert analogy.

More commonly, we are babbling nonsense.

We are enclosing them in the mastering contours of speech.

My speech has no 'mastering contours'. People tend to move away from me in a marked manner when I get garrulous at a cocktail party.

Hence the recurrent trope, so urgent in Plotinus, in the Tractatus, that the nub, the philosophic message lies in that which is unsaid, in the unspoken between the lines.

But, in both cases, we know that what was 'unspoken between the lines' was stupid shit.

What can be enunciated, what presumes that language is more or less consonant with veritable insights and demonstrations, may in fact reveal the decay of primordial, epiphanic recognitions. 

Nonsense! Either the Magi were right and the Baby Jesus was the Son of God or they were wrong. It is not the case that there could be any decay of their epiphanic recognition. Christianity affirms Christ as Pantocrator. Nobody says 'Christ started off with super powers but they decayed over time. I hear he is thinking of getting a realtor's license and maybe moving out of his parent's basement one of these days.'

It may hint at the belief that in an earlier, Pre-Socratic condition, language was closer to the wellsprings of immediacy, to the undimmed "light of Being" (so Heidegger). But there is no evidence whatever for any such Adamic privilege.

Steiner understates the matter. If Darwin is right, there is nothing special about Language. It is merely a useful adaptation on a particular fitness landscape which may not endure very long.

Inescapably, the "language-animal," as the ancient Greeks defined man, inhabits the bounded immensities of the word, of grammatical instruments.

The Greeks did not define man as anything. There was no need to do so. They could see that some men could not speak- yet they were men.  They did consider rationality of a particular sort as definingly human. A mute person could easily do what was advantageous to himself and helpful to his neighbors. Heidegger takes zoon logon echon to mean having language, not having reason. But this is silly. Parrots have a lot of language and withal are pretty and very affectionate. But birds don't need the sort of rationality upon which Cities and Kingdoms are established. They do well enough for themselves flying around shitting on statues.

The Logos equates word with reason in its very foundations.

No. Only Scriptural religions which hold that God used a Word to cause Creation to come into being make any such equation. In India, Brahmanism- which asserts 'Nada Brahma'- places a lot of emphasis on the correct pronunciation of mantras. But the consensus is that a loving and loyal heart devoted to the Lord is something far more valuable.

Thought may indeed be in exile. But if so, we do not know or, more precisely, we cannot say from what.

Yes we do. If Thought is in exile it is because mortal creatures are in exile from the bosom of the Creator. If there is no Creator then Thought may be useful or it may be useless. But it isn't in exile.

It follows that philosophy and literature occupy the same generative though ultimately circumscribed space.

Nonsense! The Literature bookshelves are clearly distinguishable from the Philosophy bookshelves. Speaking generally, Literature has literary qualities. Philosophy may have nothing of the sort. There may be some good prose stylists who were also philosophers. Sadly, they are the exception to the rule.

If Steiner is correct then one could say 'Victorian porn occupies the same generative though circumscribed space as Anal-tickle Philosophy.' So does Accountancy and the Law and books on molecular gastronomy.

Their performative means are identical: an alignment of words, the modes of syntax, punctuation (a subtle resource). This is as true of a nursery rhyme as it is of a Kant Critique.

But, because it is equally true of Audited Accounts it is a useless truth. Why not simply say 'Philosophy is identical with farting?'

Of a dime novel as of the Phaedo. They are deeds of language. The notion, as in Nietzsche or Valery, that abstract thought can be danced is an allegoric conceit.

There is the story of Memphis, the mime, who could communicate the whole of the Pythagorean philosophy with but a twitch of his butt cheeks. As a matter of fact, anything that can be said with words can also be communicated by a well enough developed sign language or system of dance.

Utterance, intelligible enunciation is all.

Sadly, there were some religious traditions which discriminated against the deaf. But that was long ago.

Together they solicit or withstand translation, paraphrase, metaphrase and every technique of transmission or betrayal.

Things which are useful become the target of mimetic processes- though some bad things too may be imitated. Mimetic effects aren't frictionless. They are error prone. Still, what is the alternative? Man lives on an uncertain fitness landscape. Recipes have to be adapted to local exigencies. Some pedants may get worked up about this and maybe that is a good thing. Keeping track of transmission errors could be helpful.

Practitioners have always known this.

Failed practitioners always have some excuse about how they ought to have been jazz musicians. Indeed, the record of their folly should be looked at as a type of jazz solo.  Also, they didn't really grab the pussy of the young intern. It was very unfair of her to beat the shit out of them.

In all philosophy, conceded Sartre, there is "a hidden literary prose."

Sartre, it must be said, could write very well which is why John Ford got him to write a screen-play for him.

Philosophic thought can be realized "only metaphorically," taught Althusser.

Then it can't be realized at all. I may, metaphorically speaking, be a billionaire and married to Beyonce. But only in a manner of speaking which, frankly, is wholly mendacious if not pathetic.

Repeatedly (but how seriously?) Wittgenstein professed that he ought to have set down his Investigations in verse.

Why not? Verse is easy to write if you have the knack for it. Kant and the Germans read Pope's 'Essay on Man' with great attention. Indeed, Kant would recite long sections of it during the course of his Lectures.

Jean-Luc Nancy cites the vital difficulties which philosophy and poetry occasion each other:"Together they are difficulty itself: the difficulty of making sense."

This difficulty recedes if either has something useful to say. Kant had no difficulty understanding Pope. Once one understands that Kant was wrong about synthetic a priori judgments, reading him becomes easy. Why? Because Kant becomes useful in that he adumburates all the types of errors which that initial error involves.

Which idiom points to the essential crux, to the creation of meaning and poetics of reason.

Only if the thing is useless. If it is useful we quickly arrive at a 'good enough', cognitively very cheap, way of making sense. Some pedants may get paid a little money to make heavy weather of the thing. But, for everybody else, it quickly becomes second nature.

Meaning is simply a type of utility. Creating it, long term, must 'pay for itself' or the thing is dismissed as nonsense. As for the 'poetics of reason', we may as well speak of its booty shake or struggles with substance abuse.

What has been less clarified is the incessant, shaping pressure of speech-forms, of style on philosophic and metaphysical programs.

Surely, this is because those who attempt to do so can't think or express themselves clearly? The profession is adversely selective.

In what respects is a philosophic proposal, even in the nakedness of Frege's logic, a rhetoric?

In the same respects that it is a form of booty-shake. Frege's twerking was heavy and Teutonic. Russell's was limber and reminiscent of the young Josephine Baker.

Can any cognitive or epistemological system be dissociated from its stylistic conventions, from the genres of expression prevalent or under challenge in its time and milieu?

Yes. Anything useful has this quality. Sadly, the same is true of useless fads.

To what degree are the metaphysics of Descartes, of Spinoza or Leibniz conditioned by the complex social and instrumental ideals of late Latin, by the constituents and underlying authority of a partially artificial Latinity within modern Europe ?

To no degree whatsoever. That is why we can easily find similar ideas in Islam and Hinduism and so forth. The first Scottish philosophers, who so revolutionized European thought, originally lectured in Latin and only switched to English during the course of the Eighteenth Century. This did not diminish their influence.

At oher points, the philosopher sets out to construe a new language, an idiolect singular to his purpose.

But, more often than not, babbles nonsense.

Yet this endeavor, manifest in Nietzsche or in Heidegger, is itself saturated by the oratorical, colloquial or aesthetic context (witness the "expressionism" in Zarathustra).

Nietzsche was mad. Heidegger had been turned down by the Jesuits and failed to get a Theology Chair at a Catholic university. His trajectory has a lot to do with Bismark's failed Kulturkampf. But, to be frank, it is based on bad philology and atrocious thinking.

There could be no Derrida outside the wordplay initiated by Surrealism and Dada, immune to the acrobatics of automatic writing. What lies nearer deconstruction than Finnegans Wake or Gertrude Stein's lapidary finding that "there is no there there"?

There could be no Derrida without Husserl's stupidity. But the same could be said about Heidegger. It simply was not obvious that Husserl was talking nonsense.  At one time he seemed smart. His PhD was in Maths. He was Weierstrass's assistant. He was rated by people like Hermann Weyl. But he took a wrong turning and wasted his life.

It is aspects of this "stylization" in certain philosophic texts, of the engendering of such texts via literary tools and fashions which I want to consider (in an inevitably partial and provisional way).

This would only be a useful exercise if those 'philosophic texts' were not obvious nonsense.

I want to note the interactions, the rivalries between poet, novelist, playwright on the one hand and the declared thinker on the other.

Note this by all means if the 'declared thinker' makes a lasting contribution. Consider Cambridge Platonists like Henry More who introduced the notion of a 'fourth dimension' and was rediscovered by the Theosophists in the late Nineteenth Century. We may certainly find it rewarding to look at 'rivalries between poets' at that time in history and to see how this affected the very useful science of Sir Isaac Newton.

But what is the point of looking at the work of babbling fools and saying 'oh! this cretin is imitating such and such poet or novelist?'

"To be both Spinoza and Stendhal" (Sartre).

But Sartre made his name by writing about what he saw around him. For a time he may have appeared the equal of both Spinoza and Stendhal. Now? Not so much.

Intimacies and reciprocal distrust made iconic by Plato and reborn in Heidegger's dialogue with Holderlin.

Holderlin had been a chum of Hegel. The poor fellow went mad. Heidegger had some silly ideas about the specialness of Greek and his own barbarous German tongue. So Holderlin was useful to him. Where is there any 'intimacy or reciprocal distrust' between them?

Fundamental to this essay is a conjecture which I find difficult to put into words.

Because thought- even foolish 'conjectures'- is not itself linguistic. Some difficulty or cognitive cost is imposed by the task of expressing a thought with any degree of precision.

A close association of music with poetry is a commonplace.

No. There is a close association between music and those poetic forms, which evolved out of songs set to music. But there are other poetic forms where this is not the case.

They share seminal categories of rhythm, phrasing, cadence, sonority, intonation and measure.

No. Some poetic forms evolved alongside music. Others did not. Pedants may categorize things but those categorizations aren't seminal or menstrual or anything other than mere pedantry.

"The music of poetry" is exactly that. Setting words to music or music to words is an exercise in shared raw materials. Is there in some kindred sense "a poetry, a music of thought" deeper than that which attaches to the external uses of language, to style?

A succession of thoughts may indeed be considered 'musical' or 'poetic' or 'scrumptious' or 'elegant' or 'cuddly' or anything else. It may well be that drinking wine or smoking dope can make even a complete moron feel that she is having very beautiful or harmonious or thrilling thoughts. But what distinguishes good and worthwhile thoughts are that they can make life better for people. The guy who concentrates on thinking beautiful thoughts may turn himself into a useless cretin.
Steiner is so focused on 'great thinkers'- though the people he revers most were actually stupid fools- that he imagines 'thought' is something very special indeed.

We tend to use the term and concept of "thought" with unconsidered scattering and largesse.

So, Steiner is saying 'ordinary people don't have thoughts. Only the great thinkers whom I revere have thoughts.'

We affix the process of "thinking" to a teeming multiplicity which extends from the subconscious, chaotic torrent of internalized flotsam, even in sleep, to the most rigorous of analytic proceedings, which embraces the uninterrupted babble of the everyday and the focused meditation in Aristotle on mind or Hegel on self.

But both Aristotle and Hegel were ignorant fools because they didn't have access, as we do, to Wikipedia.

In common parlance "thinking" is democratized.

How dare the hoi polloi claim to have thoughts!

It is made universal and unlicensed.

Nobody should be allowed to say 'I think that x is the case' unless they are able to show that they have been licensed to have thoughts by a competent authority.

But this is to confound radically what are distinct, even antagonistic phenomena.

Steiner wrote some stupid shit about how there may be 'a music of thought'. But any drunkard or drug addict may find their thoughts musical or poetic. So, Steiner has to say only very special people can think. This means he can gas on about the 'music of thought' as if the thing was sublime rather than ridiculous.

Responsibly defined — we lack a signal term — serious thought is a rare occurrence. The discipline which it requires, the abstentions from facility and disorder, are very rarely or not at all in reach of the vast majority.

Nonsense! Serious thought occurs over serious matters. Everytime we take steps to guard against an existential threat or to exploit an evolutionary advantage, our thought is serious and taken seriously by those who wish to enjoy a like felicity. Idle, playful, thought too may turn out to be very useful. But it is utility which determines what is serious from what is mere moonshine of the sort Steiner dispenses.

Most of us are hardly cognizant of what it is "to think," to transmute the bric-a-brac, the shopworn refuse of our mental currents into "thought."

But, if we enter a useful profession, we are told by others that some of our thoughts are shit while others are valuable.  I suppose, Robinson Crusoe, on his desert isle, has to learn from bitter experience which of his thoughts were 'serious' and which were utterly shit.

Properly perceived — when do we pause to consider? —the instauration of thought of the first caliber is as rare as the crafting of a Shakespeare sonnet or a Bach fugue.

But both Shakespeare and Bach could churn them out like nobody's business! The thing isn't rare at all.

Perhaps, in our brief evolutionary history, we have not yet learned how to think. The tag homo sapiens may, except for a handful, be an unfounded boast.

But Steiner wasn't of that handful. He liked hanging out with them and got many opportunities to do so. But his 'thought' grew yet more worthless as the decades passed. Shite subjects may retain their place in great Universities. Professors of shite subjects may dine at High Table with the genuinely smart. But shite they and their subjects remain. Still, if the fees paid by students of shite subjects cross-subsidize worthwhile Departments, we may be tempted to say there is some point to this Ponzi scheme.  But that isn't the truth. This is a case of allocative inefficiency caused by information asymmetry. Everyone can be better off if we tell the truth about shite subjects and the retards who teach them.

Things excellent, admonishes Spinoza, "are rare and difficult."

Why is Spinoza pleading for esotericism? The answer is that in his age, all sorts of nutters wanted to kill 'free-thinkers'. But that age is long gone. If you think Religion is a swindle just say so. You don't have to beat about the bush.

Why should a distinguished philosophic text be more accessible than higher mathematics or a late Beethoven quartet?

I don't get this. Late Beethoven quartets are perfectly accessible. In any case, some entrepreneur can add a rock beat to the thing or rescore it in some way. Higher mathematical texts soon become so easily accessible that an innumerate C.E.O can change his Business Model in line with its predictions. If a 'distinguished philosophic text' is useful to ordinary people in that it helps them lead a better life then, lo and behold!, it suddenly becomes accessible to them in a cheap paperback. There are plenty of good people wot never went to Collidge who benefit from Spinoza or Aquinas or Shantideva or Lao Tzu

Inherent in such a text is a process of creation, a "poetry" which it both reveals and resists.

Only if some Straussian fear of persecution obtains. But, surely, few of us live in fear of the Spanish Inquisition or the NKVD.

Major philosophic-metaphysical thought both begets and seeks to conceal the "supreme fictions" within itself.

But why should we bother with 'Noble Lies'? What's the worst that can happen to us? Okay, we may get called a racist but that's still better than being labelled a sad fat loser.

The bilge-water of our indiscriminate ruminations is indeed the world's prose.

No. It is merely bilge-water. Hegel lived at a time when poets were considered to be superior to novelists. Now, in the English speaking world, the word 'poet' denotes the survivor of horrendous sexual and substance abuse. Novelists, like J.K Rowling, make billions of dollars and create jobs in the Film and Television industry.

No less than "poetry," in the categorical sense philosophy has its music, its pulse of tragedy, its raptures, even, though infrequently, its laughter (as in Montaigne or Hume).

But the same could be said of farting.

"All thought begins with a poem" taught Alain in his commerce with Valery.

And every fart begins as a poem uttered by the anus.

This shared incipience, this initiation of worlds is difficult to elicit.

Farts can be difficult to elicit. On the other hand, they may suddenly appear when least called for.

Yet it leaves traces, background noises comparable to those which whisper the origins of our galaxy.

The Big Bang left no 'background noises'. Microwave radiation is not audible. Similarly a fart does not leave echoes. It may leave a lingering smell.

I suspect that these traces are discernible in the mysterium tremendum of metaphor.

A metaphor is merely a figure of speech. To say 'traces are discernible' in a figure of speech is itself merely a figure of speech. This meta-metaphor has not increased your knowledge in any way. You are simply babbling nonsense though, if you take enough drugs, you may well believe that you are bumping uglies with the numinous.

Even melody, "supreme mystery among the sciences of man" (Levi- Strauss), may, in a certain sense, be metaphoric.

But only in the sense that things which aren't metaphoric can be metaphoric.

If we are a "language-animal," we are more specifically a primate endowed with the capacity to use metaphor, so as to relate with arc lightning, Heraclitus's simile, the disparate shards of being and passive perception.

Endowed by whom? Either we evolved by Natural Selection or we didn't. If we didn't, then it makes sense to puzzle over 'being' and 'passive perception' and so forth because maybe that's what our Creator wants us to do. But if Darwin was on the right track, then we must distinguish thought which promotes inclusive fitness from mere 'displacement activity'.

Where philosophy and literature mesh, where they are litigious toward one another in form or matter, these echoes of origin can be heard.

But anything at all can be called philosophy or literature and those who are so inclined can hear echoes of origin wherever they like.

The poetic genius of abstract thought is lit, is made audible.

Just as a fart can be set alight to burn with a hard gem-like flame.

Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. 

Joseph Pujol, Le Petomane, was a French Music Hall artist who could fart whole symphonies.

What voices the closing movements of Hegel's Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf 's non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized?

Pujol could have done a better job. Sadly, he gave up his arduous profession to open a biscuit factory.

This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.

But, it raises the question- did Steiner ever listen to himself? Had he done so, he may have done something useful- like quit the Academy to open a biscuit factory.

Appadurai gassing on about Ortega Gasset

Ortega Gasset represented Spain's 'Generation of 1898'- the year America took away their colonies- Cuba and the Philippines. This humiliation led his cohort to seek to 'Europeanize' themselves by turning towards Germany- a retrograde move because it was the Anglo-Saxon world which was more developed and which would develop much further yet. Instead of going in for Pragmatism, Gasset got stuck with a vitalist, wholly vacuous, type of Phenomenology. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says-

Although Ortega hesitates to proceed as far as Cohen, that is, to postulate the “facts” of science to be determined completely by thought, a sort of Neo-Kantian metaphysics remains in his fundamental philosophical point of view. For instead of positing pure thought as solely real, Ortega replaced Cohen's logic with the notion of “human life”. In other words, Ortega's generalized view of existence contains human life in place of human logic as the underlying unifying principle of reality. Ortega's major writings were concerned with the idea of life as the “dynamic dialogue between the individual and the world”; he was not concerned, as was Cohen, with assigning to external experience a reality that is contingent upon the principles of logic and mathematical physics. 

Ortega did not understand that Einstein had used 'the principles of logic and mathematical physics' to show that Phenomenology was not just empirically wrong, it was simply stupid. There could be no relationship between the 'laws of thought' and 'scientific facts' for a purely a priori reason discoverable by an armchair 'Gedanken' or thought experiment. It would be foolish to replace 'laws of thought' by 'lived life' because life is biological. It evolves stochastically, in a manner only Game theoretically understandable, on an uncertain fitness landscape.
The Stanford Encyclopedia states

Albert Einstein, he argued, struck the first telling blow against the concept of an objective reality—a concept that assumes the existence of universal time and space into which nature fits, independently of the observer. Einstein demonstrated that there is no single spatial and chronological frame of reference.

But everybody on Earth is part of very very nearly the same 'spatial and chronological frame of reference'. It is not the case that I am cruising at the speed of light while you, slowpoke that you are, are managing only a few thousand miles per hour.

Every observer is confined to a specific and relative time-space system.

But, for our species, it is almost exactly the same system.

Ortega perceived, in this system, the “human point of view” as that reality in which we live: situations, persons and things.

But 'situations' are game theoretic and feature Knightian uncertainty. 'Persons' represent 'an extended phenotype'. They are more like a coalition than a sovereign. As for things, Science discovers new facts about them all the time.

To establish distance between ourselves and reality as a manner of understanding these lived experiences—which are by no means absolute—we have to project ourselves into the place of another person and situation. In doing so, we may come to distinguish among persons, things and situations and thereby come to observe reality more closely (Obras, III: 361, 363, 362).

It is more likely that we will fool ourselves. Our lucubrations may have some literary or modish value. But they will have nothing to do with 'reality' and everything to do with silly availability cascades marking as deeply provincial cretins. It is not the case that 'lived experience' determines the truth of Scientific facts. Rather, Scientific advances may change our biology and have definitely changed our 'lived experience'. That is why the STEM subjects 'pay for themselves'. They improve 'lived experience' so much that we gladly pay for further Research. By contrast, Phenomenology did not pay for itself. It was a waste of resources. It now attracts only credential craving dunces. This is a wholly imaginary type of scholarship and Arjun Appadurai- an anthropologist too fastidious to spend his time with naked cannibals- has made a good living exploring a 'social imaginary' of an impoverished and puerile kind.

He has written an article titled 'The Revolt of the Elites' in the Wire-

José Ortega y Gasset is a largely forgotten 20th century thinker, an unconventional Spanish philosopher whose most important social science work, 'The Revolt of the Masses', reflected his fears about a world in which liberal individuals were disappearing and the “mass man” was emerging.

Gaseous Gasset liked Nietzche. He thought people like himself who had a superior 'lived reality' should form an Elite and save Society from the smug, materialistic, philistines. Sadly, Gasset's political life was a failure. He ran away from the Republic and only returned for a while to Franco's Spain after the Second World War when the regime was keen to keep in America's good books. Thankfully, this meant that technocrats could run things and so Spain's economic development took off. Its 'mass-man' could become Western European rather than, as Gasset had said of Unamuno, suffering the doom of 'Africanization'. Like Heidegger's Germany, Gassy Gasset's Spain moved in a Liberal direction under American tutelage. Thus Pragmatism won. Phenomenology shat the bed.

Ortega’s idea of the mass man was not a picture of the poor, the destitute or the proletarian multitude but of a mass of average men, who were rendered similar by their tastes, dispositions and values, rather than by their dispossession. In this way, Ortega was closer to the later American critics of the men “in the grey flannel suit” than to the Frankfurt School critics of mass society. Still, Ortega was an early voice in seeing the masses, of whatever kind, as revolting against the liberal ideals of the 19th century.

But the liberals of the 18th century thought the masses were revolting against them as did those of the 17th century and so forth. Gasset was unusual in that he got elected to Parliament shortly after publishing a book about the Revolting Masses. But those Masses kept revolting more and more revoltingly and so he ran away. Franco systematically raped and beat the shit out of the revolting Masses till it was safe for Gassy Gasset to come back.

I return to Ortega now because I think the 20th century has exhausted the major forms of mass revolt

because revolting masses get beaten and raped and Gulaged till they stop being so revolting.

and that we have entered a new epoch which is characterised by the “revolt of the elites”.

Coz Appadurai posed as a Leftie to an American audience. So he is making out he is against elites though he was part of the Credentialist Ponzi scheme which promised students entry into power elites.

These revolting elites are those who support, surround, promote and flatter the new autocracies of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban and many others who have created what could be called ‘populism from above’ – where the people are electoral tools for a mass exit from democracy.

Coz if someone Appadurai doesn't like gets elected it must be because there was a 'mass exit from democracy'.

Why call this behaviour of the new autocratic elites a “revolt” rather than simply predatory capitalism, cronyism, neoliberalism in its latest guise, disaster capitalism, all of which are available terms?

Why not simply speak of Fascism and compare everyone you don't like to Hitler?

Who are these new elites and what are they revolting against?

There has been no change in the composition of elites around the world over the last thirty years. Nor, truth be told, has there been any 'revolt'. True, a certain sort of academic has lost prestige- but that was bound to happen because they started to publish stuff in e-zines available to the masses who soon discovered these guys were stupid, ignorant and more than a little kray kray.

First, they are revolting against all the other elites whom they despise, hate and fear: liberal elites, media elites, secular elites, cosmopolitan elites, “Harvard” elites, WASP elites, older economic elites, intellectuals, artists and academics (these categories are a pool, from which different national populists choose the appropriate national and cultural terms). So, this is an elite which disguises its own elitism in a discourse of anti-elitism.

Just as Appadurai is doing here. Essentially he is describing a Paretian 'circulation of elites'. But that sort of thing has always happened. There is nothing new here.

Second, this revolt is against all those who are believed to have betrayed the real elites and captured power illegitimately: blacks in the US, Muslims and secularists in India, leftists and LGBT people in Brazil, dissenters, NGOs and journalists in Russia, religious, cultural and economic minorities in Turkey, immigrants, workers and trade unionists in the United Kingdom.

Because the US and India and Brazil and Turkey and Russia and the U.K are all so similar, naturally you'd see the same sorts of revolts happening in each of them! But what about the 'yellow vests' in France? Why no mention of 'populist' movements in Italy and Greece and Spain? What makes them different?

This is a revolt by those who think they are true elites against those they consider usurpers or false elites.

Very true. Ghanchis have been saying for a long time- 'we are hereditary oil-pressers by caste. We are the true elite.' That's why Modi is Prime Minister. From birth he was told that he had an entitlement to the highest office in the land.

Third, the revolt of these new elites is against the chains that have bound them in the epoch of liberal democracy.

But, Appadurai you silly man, you are saying their revolt has succeeded! Thus no 'chains bound them' in the preceding epoch.

They hate liberty, equality and fraternity, except for themselves.

How does Appadurai know? Perhaps he thinks those he castigates are like unto himself in this respect.

They hate checks and balances, which they view as illegitimate restrictions on their freedom to act without restraint. They hate regulations of any type, especially of corporate privileges, which they see as a conspiracy against capitalism which they view as their private jurisdiction. And above all, they hate deliberation and procedural rationality, since they involve listening, patience and adherence to collective rationalities. They also do not believe in the separation of powers, except when their friends control the legislature and the judiciary.

Appadurai is describing the behavior of senior Liberal Arts Academics like himself. But the upshot is that portion of the Academy shrinks and becomes adversely selective. If regimes are dysfunctional, they get voted out. Why pretend that any of the 'autocrats' Appadurai mentions can't be displaced at the next General Election?

What this means, most simply, is that the revolt of the new elites is against democracy, but the twist is that this revolt is undertaken in the name of the people.

No. The twist is there are no new elites- more particularly because Appadurai insists they are actually the old elites rebelling against the increasing power of Homosexual Minorities.

In other words, the modern idea of the people has been completely split from the idea of demos and democracy. This is a revolt – in the sense that uprisings to seize power are always revolts – but not a revolution, intended to change something in the fundamental order of polity or economy. This revolt is the effort by one elite to replace another.

So this isn't a revolt. It is merely the ordinary working of the law of the circulation of elites.

All this might seem overly general and historically familiar if we do not ask a few sociological questions. What is the nature of this new elite? Who defines its conditions of entry? Who speaks for it? What are its social roots? These questions quickly bring us to specific societies and states.

But specific societies and states have already decided that people who ask sociological questions are as thick as shit.

In the case of the United States, the elite that Trump speaks for and to come from backgrounds like his: they are not over-educated, they are mobile entrepreneurs or politicians, they are the rulers of the Republican Senate, the Republican side of the House, and Tea Party jetsam and flotsam at every level of politics. In addition, they include the more megalomaniac or neo-fascist CEOs (including Silicon Valley icons like Peter Thiel), the vast majority of the television and radio media, and the extensive network of racist and greedy evangelical pastors, churches and donors. Add to this the careerist hacks in the major right-wing think-tanks.

But these guys have been around for a long time! Where is the 'revolt'?

At the very core of this network of elites without any obvious cultural roots, status or history are secret networks such as those in the Federalist Society,

Wow! The Federalist Society is a 'secret network'! Who knew!

with ties to such transnational groups as Opus Dei.

who employ albino assassins.

These are networks of opportunism, greed and profiteering which have no other traditional ties or values.

coz Opus Dei aint Catholic. It is a bunch of Jews, Freemasons, atheists and other such rootless cosmopolitans.

A similar picture could be painted of the elites of the current regime in India, which is openly contemptuous of every democratic institution except elections. It is composed of half-educated economists, career thugs, kleptocratic business tycoons that work through monopoly, lobbying and straightforward corruption, and the newly shameless class of criminal politicians and legislators.

But this has always been the case! Still, things have gotten better. Unlike Manmohan, Modi does not have any actual murderers in his Cabinet.

The revolt of this elite is against every person or group associated with Nehruvian socialism, secularism and pluralism.

Yet, one of Nehru's two great-grandsons is an M.P for the ruling party while the other is with the Opposition. Had his Daddy not died in a glider accident, Maneka, not Sonia, would be heading the Congress party and Varun, not Rahul, would be a P.M candidate.

It is an elite that believes that the Hindu Right (their own club) are the sleeper-saviours of Indian history, waking up after the long slumber of Mughal, British and Congress rule, an alliance forged in the crucible of anti-Muslim ideologies, policies and pogroms. There is no real class unity for this revolting elite, except for their hold on the means of impunity, political, social and economic. Like Trump’s elite partners, this is an elite of opportunism, lubricated by contempt for participatory institutions of every type.

So, Appadurai's 'social imaginary' lets him see India and America as identical. Yet, one country is rich. The other is poor. Their histories are very different. Yet, for Appadurai, they are identical. What happens in one country must happen in the other because Americans and Indians are virtually identical.

Although I do not know enough about the social origins and pet peeves of Erdogan’s crew, or Putin’s, or Bolsonaro’s, or Duterte’s, I am prepared to speculate

on the basis of impartial ignorance

that each of these revolting elites has a similar profile: resentment of traditional cultural and social elites, contempt for liberal proceduralism, hatred of intellectuals, academics, artists, activists, socialists, feminists, admiration for capitalism so long as it regulated only in their favour, and a hatred of democracy matched by their cultish pursuit of the voter (rather than the people).

Appadurai has made a great discovery. Everybody is actually the same person. Why bother with Geography and Linguistics and so forth? Whatever Appadurai says is happening in one country- viz. the elites are revolting- must be happening everywhere else. Such is the power of the 'Social imaginary'.

Orban has just declared his eternal and absolute power in Hungary, Trump has required his name to be printed on COVID-19 relief checks and said that he can use emergency powers to do whatever he likes in the present crisis. Modi has more or less declared himself above the constitution of India, has made common and public cause with Bolsonaro, Trump and Netanyahu, and has used the COVID-19 crisis to extend to all of India the policies of curfew, police beatings, false imprisonments and generalised repression tested in Kashmir. In all these moves, these leaders rely on a network of sympathisers and collaborators who believe that they will thrive if they comply with the Supreme Leader.

Previously, Appadurai had mentioned Boris Johnson as representing a similar 'revolt of the elites'. Why no mention of BoJo in the above list?

Thus, if the elites who characterise many of the world’s new populist autocracies are “populists from above” elites revolting against previous elites, revolted by liberal democracy, how do we account for their followers, their voters, and their base, the “people” in whose name and with whose burning consent they are undoing many democratic structures, values and traditions?

We know how Appadurai accounts for them. They are all actually the same person.

There are some familiar answers to this most troubling question. One is that these autocrats understand and use the instruments of affect (sentiments of love, loss, sacrifice, hate, anger) whereas their opponents are adrift in a sea of quasi-academic arguments about concepts, norms and logic, which have lost all popular purchase.

In other words, guys who get elected talk like normal people while guys who don't get elected talk gobbledygook.

The second is that there is something about the global rise of technologies of aspiration (advertising, consumer goods, celebrity cults, corporate windfalls) that has made the poor and subaltern classes impatient with the slowness of liberal deliberative processes. They want prosperity and dignity now, and these leaders promise it to them.

Unlike when Obama was in office when people said 'we don't want prosperity and dignity now. We prefer poverty and humiliation.'

Another argument is that the lower classes are so fed up with the exclusion, impoverishment and humiliation that they identify with their predatory leaders (who simply grab what they want) that they are more than ever susceptible to the distractions of ethnophobia (against Muslims, refugees, Chinese, Gypsies, Jews, migrants, and so on). All these arguments make some sense in some national contexts

to Appadurai. But the man is as stupid as shit.

But I suggest that the biggest insight that Ortega y Gasset offers is to help us to see that we are in the beginnings of an epoch in which the revolt of the masses has been captured, coopted and displaced by the revolt of the elites.

So Gassy Gasset helps Appadurai to see he is at the beginning of some epoch or the other. For him personally, if not death, it is likely to be dementia. For the rest of us, however, no epoch is beginning or ending. We now know that the Liberal Arts are shite. Professors of shite subjects develop a mania for parading their naked imbecility on shittier and shittier E-fora. Just think, if Appadurai had kept his mouth shut and pretended to know about headhunting cannibals, we'd still think well of him.

Amia Srinivasan, Heidegger and the University strike

Amia Srinivasan writes in the LRB

Despite the Tory government’s campaign to transform higher education from a public good into a private concern, students are not customers, not yet, and we who teach them are not sellers of commodities, not yet.

Srinivasan is a Philosopher- i.e. she teaches, for pay, a subject which created by a rich guy called Plato who opened a School called the Academy, which charged fees to wealthy students.  Philosophy was a commodified service provided through the market- just like the skills imparted by Sophists or Wrestling Coaches or Dance Masters.

This is not to say that a Feudal Lord, or the Church, or a Nation State could not use tax revenue or other types of rents to fund Higher Education. In this case, teachers- when not slaves, where paid through the market though students were accepted or rejected on the basis of the 'command' of whoever was authorizing expenditure on their education.

A public good- in Economics- is one which is non rival and non excludable. This means, if it is supplied to one person, no one else can be excluded from gaining it. The Academy, speaking generally, operates in the opposite manner. Worthwhile courses are likely to be oversubscribed and so educational opportunities are rationed either on the basis of price or merit or some combination of the two.

Marx clarified that commodities exist even where there is no market. Engels' theory of 'simple commodity production' refers to a situation where a good or service may be produced for self-consumption- the possibility of exchange not having been contemplated. Plato may well have exchanged instruction in Philosophy for instruction in Mathematics. This would be a case of 'simple commodity exchange'.

After the Second World War, Britain rationed Higher Education mainly through the State, not the Market. Thatcher did not do much to reverse this outcome, though one or two Private Colleges and one Private University came up. It was under Labor that the American model was adopted. Market based commodification was considered the best way to transform the British working class into a highly skilled and highly productive workforce able to compete with other advanced countries in an increasingly Knowledge based Global Economy.

Srinivasan says 'teachers (at British Universities) are not sellers of commodities.' This is not the case. They sell teaching services to a College or University in return for a salary. The students pay the College or University or else their fees are tendered by some Charitable or other body. Universities could be disaggregated so that they resemble what obtained in ancient times. Scholars would contract with individual teachers for tutoring in their specialty. Indeed, there is a flourishing market for Private Tutors in the United Kingdom.

Srinivasan's article is motivated by her experiences during the recent strike of University staff in England.

We are still participants in the project of the university: a project of free and collaborative inquiry, of mutual respect, of imagination. The fact that most academic labour is not yet entirely alienated – that even now it contains a spirit of vocation and reciprocity – generates a seeming paradox.

If it is true that 'academic labor is not yet alienated' in some respect then it must be the case that Academics are not proletarians. They are not engaged in Class Struggle. They may go on strike for the same reason that oligarchs may order a 'lock-out' or embargo. Though they themselves may become richer or benefit in some other way by industrial action, what they are doing goes against the interests of the working class.

In striking, lecturers apparently double down on the logic of commodification we seek to resist: we become waged workers in a dispute with our bosses, the anger of our student-customers a means to improving our conditions.

What makes the strike of academics reprehensible is that its members belong to the privileged class with respect to the commodity whose supply they seek to restrict in a manner which harms no one save those who aspire to a like privilege.

But it is in fact the refusal to strike – invariably defended as a form of teacherly concern – that betrays both our students and the university we share with them.

Fascists may equally well argue that the refusal to kill Trade Unionists and Socialists and Jews represents a betrayal of the working class because Trade Unions and Socialist Idealogues and people inspired by the Jewish Faith are, in some occult manner, working against the interests of the 'sons of the soil'.

When people insist that the university is simply a place of love, and not also a place of work, they offer cover to exploitation – of staff, of students, and of the ideals of the university itself.

When people insist that the Nation is simply a place of love- not a place where Leftists and Jews and Homosexuals are pitilessly massacred- they offer cover to exploitation of gullible sons of the soil by plausible rogues intent on collectivizing rectums for the unholy purpose of politically correct sodomy.

Last week, one of my philosophy colleagues showed up at the picket line in front of Exam Schools, I assumed to cross it. (Earlier that week I had seen another philosophy lecturer shuffle out of the building with what I would like to think was shame; he had been delivering a lecture on ethics.)

Philosophy lecturers should shuffle around with a hang dog air because their lectures on Ethics are utterly shite. But this is not the reason Amia herself attributes to his abject appearance. She thinks he felt ashamed for crossing a picket line so as to do the job he was paid for and serve the students who looked to him for instruction.

If Amia thinks the lecturer should feel shame because he let down his colleagues and thus may have contributed to their getting a smaller pay award, then she should say so. Why does she mention Marxist notions like 'commodification' (i.e. production for exchange) or 'alienation'? Such notions do not apply to those in so privileged a position that they have a great surplus of the thing in comparison to those who are paying dearly to acquire a portion of it.

Why is Amia pretending to understand Marxist economics? Earlier in her article she mentioned a 'teach-out' she attended. This supplies us a clue as to her motivation.

Last Wednesday, at a time when I would have been delivering an undergraduate lecture on feminism, my students organised a teach-out on some of the themes of the course: capitalism, work and reproduction. I sat at the back of a crowded seminar room in Balliol College – the Oxford colleges don’t recognise the UCU, which means that when we strike it is only with respect to our university, not college, contracts – and listened as students spoke about wages for housework and sex work, marketisation and commodification, Rosa Luxemburg and Silvia Federici.

I suppose this article is Amia's attempt to profit by the instruction her students, very kindly, accorded her.

She goes on to speak of another Lecturer whose action she admires-

He was supposed to be delivering an undergraduate lecture on metaphysics and epistemology. Instead he put on an armband and took some leaflets. As his students came out of the lecture hall, confused by his absence, he handed them leaflets and spoke to them about the strike. He was still their teacher, just teaching them something new. Those who insist that striking lecturers do not love their students fail to see that love can still be work, and that the picket can be a classroom.

 Nobody insists that 'striking lecturers do not love their students'- though, more often than not, it is a case of sexual harassment simply. What we insist on is that people we pay to do some work for us actually do that work, not love us immensely while remaining bone idle. The picket can be a classroom- but one where the only thing one learns is how to picket. Similarly a Philosophy classroom can't be a picket- even if it is presided over by a cretinous bully like Angana Chatterji- because it does not represent a collective action in restraint of trade.

Heidegger, it will be remembered, welcomed Hitler's ascent to Power and, as Rector of Freiburg, happily presided over the expulsion of Jewish students and faculty. How did he justify himself? The answer is that he, like Amia, invokes a doctrine of necessity which is superior to Knowledge which the latter must bow down to.

Heidegger says

' An old story was told among the Greeks that Prometheus had been the first philosopher. Aeschylus has this Prometheus utter a saying that expresses the essence of knowing: τέχυη δάυάγκης άσ ϑєυєστέρα µακρώ (Prom. 514, ed. Wil). “Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.” That means that all knowing about things has always already been surrendered to the predominance of destiny and fails before it. Precisely because of this, knowing must unfold its highest defiance. Only then will the entire power of the concealedness [Verborgenheit ] of what is rise up and knowing will really fail. In this way, what is opens itself in its unfathomable inalterability and lends knowing its truth.

In this article, we see Amia being seduced by a Heideggerean motif which, sadly, had a corollary in the mischegoss of the Left. The notion here is that 'positive' knowledge, commodified and supplied by Colleges competing with each other for customers, must yield to some dark force- a materialistic determinism whose chthonic roots are inaccessible to the Academy's Promethean leaps or Apollonian flights- and thus only by becoming 'negative' can knowledge bitterly partake of the truth of Being- by way of the detour of a futile struggle for which it is entirely un-equipped.

What is the truth of the matter? Services suffer from 'Baumol Cost disease'. As Baumol came to recognize this can be overcome by export based specialization. The UK will see a shakeout of substandard 'generalist' Institutions and courses. But it will retain, by reason of acquired advantage, plenty of high paying specialist Institutions imparting marketable skills or efficient 'market signals' to students of various descriptions. But, in Higher Education, you will see few whose habitus is Lower class. There may have been a time when the garbage man and the lollipop lady coveted PhDs in Gramscian Grammatology, but those days have long passed.