Illiberalism

Episode 70: Experience as Experiment

In sections 77 and 78 we read of the ways in which experience and experiment inter-relate on a spectrum via anticipatory grasping, a desire for an exposition of regulatory, testing, inputting, placing objects in temptation, and the establishment of an essential objective domain accessible only through quantitative rules. We then discuss how anxiety plays into…

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Episode 69: All the Substance Sucked Out

We finally conclude section 76 with a short section about newspaper science (the humanities) and machine science (the natural sciences). Heidegger states that “newspaper and machine are meant here…as the impelling modes of that final objectification…which sucks all the substantiveness out of beings, leaving them mere occasions for lived experience.” After parsing this all out,…

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Episode 68: The Great Unsettlement

We continue going through section 76 with readings on the universities becoming business establishments bent on system-building erudition, the hidden goal of complete boredom at scientific innovation, and how the great unsettlement comes from essential knowledge, not powerlessness or hopelessness. We conclude with discussions of the degradations of the universities via the rot of money,…

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Episode 67: The Mechanical Organic

We conclude Section 74 which includes explications on how historiology seeks to avoid history by standardizing interpretative viewpoints, how “newspaper science” and “humanities departments” have institutionalized knowledge, and how the closure against nature as much as history is due to technicism self-interpreting as “organic worldview.” We conclude with thoughts on the new era of unknowing,…

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Episode 66: Historiology Never Touches History

We continue reading through section 74 about science’s failure to determine the essential beings in its area of study, about its politicized “meaning-conferrals,” and about historiology as a comparative method of erasing difference. We then look at some recent media stories as examples of a liberalized (aka performatively politicized) epistemology as well as the way…

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Episode 65: The Explanatory Nexus of Causation

In Section 74 we continue following Heidegger’s meditations on science as “knowledge of an essential truth experienced in advance.” Via science’s determinate direction of explainability, we are enmeshed in a nexus of cause-effect relations that places everything under its jurisdiction of explanation and produces historiological machination via the perpetual instituting of “correct findings.” We connect…

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Episode 64: Science as Total Mobilization

In sections 74 and 75 we read of “total mobilization” as the setting in motion and undermining of all previous contents of still-enduring formations, the priority of procedures and contrivances, and the pressing of the masses into service. This is the outcome of modern science as a derived instituting of knowledge that places what is…

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Episode 63: The Subversive Enshrinement of Truths

Section 73 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) links “science” and the “abandonment by being.” Science has become the “conceptually pre-formed consequence of the interpretation of the beingness of beings under the guideline of thinking.” In short, a “concoction of ‘world-views’ composed of indiscriminately adopted forms of thought.” Heidegger says we must meditate on…

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Episode 62: Machination as Nihilism

In section 72, we get an expansion of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism from being without a goal (telos) to being the essential occurrence of the abandonment by being, aka machination, lived experience, and liberalism. Two “oppositional forms of nihilism” are discussed – Christianity and Bolshevism – whose “denial of a lack of goals” gives birth…

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Episode 61: The World as Distorted Picture

In the middle of section 69 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), we read more of the gigantic and how it is the incalculable in the form of the plight of the lack of a sense of a plight due to the distorted essence its “world as picture” and quantitative sense of time and…

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