Illiberalism

Episode 74: The End of Metaphysics

Reading thru the middle of section 85 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we wade through meditations on the overcoming of metaphysics, or “the knowledge of the ‘being’ of beings.” This leads to a variety of musings on how liberalism is the real world manifestation of the metaphysical heritage, so the process of ending…

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Episode 73: Logic as Powerless Thinking

We begin a new super section of the book, 3: The Interplay, and read about the forms of historical meditation, the passing of the ball from the first to the other beginning, and logic as a vestige of the powerlessness of thinking. This gives rise to discussions on how to free thought of logic, or…

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Episode 72: The Ineptitude of Exactitude

In the final passages of section 80, Heidegger asks, “what is ‘more sure’: the immediate, naive description or the exact experiment?,” and then answers, “the former, because there theory is presupposed ‘less’.” Discussing this startling proposition, we conclude super section 2, The Resonating. Along the way we discuss “teaching to the test,” liberal education’s failure…

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Episode 71: What Not To Look At?

In sections 78 and 79 we read of the transformation of experience into a mathematico-rational measuring experiment opposed to “arbitrary, merely curiosity-motivated exploration of an indeterminately represented domain.” We spin off from these speculations to look at how the liberal/non-liberal dichotomy involves different perspectives on freedom of speech and law and order on a gradient…

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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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