Hegel Symposium (& my abstract)

If you are in Dublin I'll be giving a paper at the UCD-CPRG Hegel conference on the 10th of June. Details can be found here.

And here is my abstract:

‘Too bad for the flower´: Hegel´s Litany of Errors - Paul Ennis (UCD)

In this paper I want to examine the most perverse notion in Hegelianism i.e. the claim that error, illusion, and the negative must be included in our understanding of truth. Hegel´s Phenomenology of Spirit seems to invite two readings. One reading emphasizes sublation and the retention of aspects of prior ´truths´ in each progressive stage of reason’s development. The other reading suggests that we have nothing more here than an arbitrary assemblage of ideas torn from their epochal context and jammed together like ill-fitting jigsaw pieces. The latter reading invites us to ask: to what extent is Hegelianism a gross error? I will explore why Hegel feels it necessary to include error in his thinking as an attempt to situate appearances as opening out from within the ´inaccessible´ noumenal realm and how he manages to inscribe illusion into the heart of the relation between thought and being - tellingly named by Hegel illusory being. It is precisely because Hegelianism is a meditation on doubling, self-othering, and mirroring that it provides a detailed account of being´s manifestation as thought. In order to provide this account Hegel must posit as an aspect of truth a litany of neccessary errors.

Martin Gessmann confirmed for 21st Century Heidegger conference

We have just added our second keynote speaker for the 21st Century Heidegger conference. It will be Martin Gessmann (Heidelberg University).

At this stage I think the conference has gone beyond my expectations!

21st Century Heidegger news

Just some updates on the conference. First off here is a revised and fancier version of the CFP.

Second as you can see on the CFP we have now have four confirmed speakers:
Professor Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Dr François Raffoul (Louisiana State University)
Dr Joseph Cohen ((University College Dublin)
Dr Andrew Haas (University College Dublin)

Alongside our keynote speaker:
Professor Miguel de Beistegui
The University of Warwick

Remember submission deadline is Friday, July 23rd, 2010!

Heidegger and the Chase

Too wired to write, too wired not to write. A blog post seems the wise option. I’m writing an article on Heidegger and technology for a general audience and it has brought me back my copy of Basic Writings. I haven’t used it a long time as my interest in Heidegger has shifted back to his early work these past few years. My copy of Basic Writings is marked by all kinds of odd scribbles: ‘uncanny’ ‘disclosure’ ‘inexpressible’ (!). This tells me something about my state of mind in those first few months of my dissertation. I entered Heidegger through the collection Poetry, Language, Thought and what attracted me to Heidegger was precisely his ability to disclose, in some intuitive sense, what is uncanny/inexpressible about human existence (or better yet human frailty). It is odd but I now see Heidegger in precisely the opposite light i.e. as a thinker in the German idealist tradition attempting to articulate human freedom (Sartre pulls together the traditions better though). I cannot read Heidegger as I did in the same way now. The Heidegger I know [and if I know some ‘other’ I have never met it is him] is a deeply structured thinker. He is a thinker of phenomenal unity – linear in an odd sense or perhaps just driven if we can express it psychologically. I also know from reading about his life that this desire to structure arose from a deep unease about what we all like to talk about these days: contingency. I am sure there are other thinkers who try to ‘capture’ contingency (Kant, Hegel) but Heidegger’s gamble (not his alone) is that ‘being’ provides something akin to ‘structure’: the conditions for occasioning [revealing – das Entbergen]. The enterprise mirrors so many others: they all seem to be chasing after something that is characterized by being one-step-ahead (and who thinks this better than Derrida: strain your neck forward!). It makes chasing after them a chasing-after-those-who chase-after-what-is-already-ahead.

CPRG on Platonism

Continental Philosophy Reading Group paper on Platonism.

Know Thyself as Delphic Decree:
An existential reading of the Platonic Forms
by Gwen Murphy

This paper examines two readings of Platonism, the traditional metaphysical reading and an alternative existential reading. The paper argues that the latter reading is preferable not only because it is more faithful to the dialogues but because this form of Platonism reveals our ability to live a meaningful existence – without any need to search for 'The Truth out there’ (whatever and wherever that is). This interpretation presents the reader with an alternative to the modern, naturalistic understanding of reality, which diminishes the status of our existence as human beings to the role of a (very small) cog in the universe. This alternative need not deny our place in the natural evolution of things, nor does it leave the responsibility for living a meaningful existence in the hands of a Christian, or any other, deity.

Philosophenweg Pictures

Meillassoux's Promise

More and more I hear certain scepticism about the latter half of After Finitude. If one takes the lesson from Meillassoux that when we get down to it all is contingent even contingency then we simply reiterate a point driven home as far back as Nietzsche: that we exist is nothing necessary. It could have been otherwise. And it can be otherwise. No, even stronger, it will be otherwise. But I do not think Meillassoux’s posits a radical finitude (this is more Brassier). The ‘after’ finitude is a precisely the infinity of Badiou: the knowing that one uncovers with rationalism and its ultimate principle is proof of the supreme inconsistency inscribed in both mind and nature. That things can be otherwise...does this not also mean that what one sees now might crumble as if it never existed? And if this is the case then all that we are confronted with can be shown as inconsistency embodied. All bodies can be broken down. The edge of Meillassoux is a pointer of something to come: it is his cosmological description of the event (to come). In this crucial sense there are no limits. We can traverse barriers.

Trip to Heidelberg (philosophenweg!)

Yesterday I had the chance to go on the Philosophenweg. It is very much Hölderlin territory. The old city has an old vibe. It feels old. Not presented as old but geniunely oozes a sense of walking through the past. On the way back from the castle my eagle eyed girlfriend spotted a sign for a (demolished) house that Hannah Arendt once lived in. I had no idea it was there but it felt strange since the sign indicated the absence of the house. The space where it stood remains but the building is gone. Not sure what to make of that one. It goes without saying that being somewhere where both Arendt and Hölderlin walked is slightly unsettling but especially so for a Heideggerian. They both appear as periphery characters in his monologue. It is sometimes hard to think of them seperate from all that. Needless to say it is a city for philosophers.

I´m not sure where things are going with the work at the moment. The silence on the blog is not the result of overwork but a tinge of angst. I feel I am either on the cusp of having something to say or a momentary descent into writer´s block/general confusion. When this happens my only defense is to read different people. For the moment Badiou is providing that service. So I am not sure how busy the blog will be for the next few months but there should be some updates on Speculations and the Heidegger conference.

Tim Morton Interview

Peter Gratton has just posted an Interview and Introduction with Tim Morton. Well worth checking out.

Morton's 'Ecology without Nature'

I’ve just moved into a new place and access to the internet is pretty much going to become something I used to have. I’m going full-on dissertation wise for the next four months, but since I’ve no internet I’ve opened up a few free hours in the evening time for more ‘casual’ reading. Since I’ve developed something of a reading backlog this is good timing. So the blog will occupy something of a ‘reading notes’ aura for the next few months. The first book I picked up (next up is Vibrant Matter I think) is Morton’s ‘Ecology without Nature.’

But before getting into it I wanted to give a quick nod to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia which I’ve been reading to get me out of a rut. Our Hegel reading group is pushing into ‘Spirit’ at the moment and I had found myself increasingly alienated from Hegel’s ideas for a month or do. The best thing to do with Hegel, or so it seems to me, is to pick up the Encyclopaedia (Logic) since it is something of a pedagogical text. Oh and I can’t recommend Inwood’s Hegel Dictionary enough either. I’ve also re-read After Finitude and corrected a number of errors that had built up in my reading. In particular it is clear that I had misunderstood the literal-realist-countersense section in the opening. This entailed a lot of revision on my part, but looking back I now see that it takes quite some time for deeply engrained errors to become visible. But all this I am learning to live with. I am happy to bask in the presence of better-informed people as long as they don’t mind me confusing the issue from time to time!

I’m not sure what to make of Morton’s book if I’m honest. I know I want to agree with his central thesis (the title is the thesis), but there are some claims that I plain don’t get. For example what does ‘Nature is transcendental’ mean? Does this mean ‘Nature’ is something constructed ‘from’ the human end i.e. is Nature ordered in some Kantian sense [or put more awkwardly is Nature a mere appearance or even a phenomenon, but nothing ‘in-itself?]. Or am I reading too much into this claim? Or does it mean that Nature is something ‘constructed’ as with a narrative and transcendental here means something like ‘grand narrative’ and so must be deconstructed?

If I have some kind of intuitive grip as to what it means the idea is something like ‘Nature’ (or perhaps the ‘idea of Nature’] as imagined or fashioned by humans actually gets in the way of a proper relation to the earth/animals [I am sure scu liked the bit about animals being ‘the question’]. Space and Place are interesting in this sense and Morton lays a heavy accent on the emergence of place as a theme in green thinking – something I admit to being guilty of myself. Place can seem to be an inflated, quasi-fantastic, construct retrojected onto a past world that never quite existed as we wish it did. This sort of pessimism is everywhere in Morton and reminds me a little of Adorno at times. But I also wonder whether here critique goes too far. Morton discusses the necessary turning back, or self-reflexive-ness, that critique must deploy (on itself), but in so much as this dialectic can be useful in keeping critique sensible it seems to me that in this particular move it is nearly impossible to know whether we are also cancelling out ‘real places’ that were actually closer to our ideal than Morton wants to give them credit for. But to argue this case in either direction would require some Foucault-esque digging that is way behind my skill set. [But I should note I love his use of Marx on land in deflating Romantic notions – why are there sheep grazing in the lovely fields? Well we moved all the people to the cities...]

Some minor quirks that seem to belong to literary theory emerge too. For one Morton seems worried that he might be considered a postmodernist. Moving on to Heidegger I admit to being a little confused by the use Morton makes of him. Heidegger crops up smack bang in the middle of a discussion of...Tolkien. He is actually squashed between a discussion of Tolkien and narrative and I am not sure exactly why he is even there:

“In Heidegger’s supremely environmental philosophy, the surrounding ambience created by Tolkien’s narrative is called Umwelt. This is the deep ontological sense in which things are “around” – that may come in handy, but whether they do or not, we have a care for them. It is a thoroughly environmental idea. Things are oriented in relation to one other things: “The house has its sunny side and its shady side” (97-98). This is fine if a little random but then we get this gem:“Others (elves, dwarves, men) care for their surroundings differently” and then we are back to Middle Earth and narrative: “The strangeness of Middle-Earth...” (98). I plain don’t know what is happening in this bit, but perhaps I’m too far out from theory these days to sit comfortably with a mixing of Tolkien and Heidegger.

We also get a bit of discussion of materialism, sometimes Marxist tinged and other times more generalized, and I am always slightly suspicious of the word ‘materialism.’ I am not sure what is designated by the term most times – what the referent is as such – the ‘sheen’ of the object or the ‘stuff’ or what? Ditto for vibrant matter, but I’ll wait to see what Bennett has to say on all this before coming to a conclusion. I do like the idea of ‘ambience’ or ‘vibrancy’ and I can see, excluding the more obvious connections, why they might be helpful for object oriented ontology. Ambience and vibrancy are, after all, quite allusive and sensual terms and they are often used to describe the ‘surrounding’ (or environmental) sense that belongs to perceptual experience. Clearly these are not thinkers seeking out what grounds Husserlian ‘essential correlations,’ but rather a sensuous ‘fold’ [borrowing for a moment from Deleuze who I think pre-empts much of what Morton/Harman/Bennett are trying to capture – it is also interesting how the fold only really emerges in Deleuze’s Leibniz book reminding us of the ‘new metaphysics’ at work in all the new stuff].

But there are worries to capturing something like ambience or vibrancy or even matter (I am leaving the arguments from Morton behind for a moment). At least one problem boils down to whether ‘ambience’ is meant here to describe a phenomenon, is it to be considered as ‘grasped’ intuitively (or even conceptually?), or if we are past this and going for a direct description of ‘what is all around us’ and immediate – in which case there are good arguments for leaving aside the non-theory philosophers [they’ll drag their feet...!]. But the reservations are fairly minor in that I agree with the overall tenor of the book and what Morton is trying to do. So I think I’ll try to join in the reading group and really think through what is happening in this book.

Internet Weirdness (the Heidegger/Derrida youtube vid)

It is pretty cool that Seferin James' (who I share both office space and supervisor with) video is now being picked up on the SR scene. Having watched bits of this being made and then seeing it morph into a 30,000+ hit youtube buzz and then even cropping up on various blogs I think this is one of more surreal things about contemporary life and its weird connections. Even more interesting is seeing how those concrete concerns (i.e. knowing the classes/discussions/people that inspired this) and how the general vibe transcends all that to hit on the key anxieties of writing on Heidegger/Derrida etc.