Since I use Orexis Dianoētikē as a nexus knotting together intellectual threads from my other, more specifically focused blogs, I'm doing that in this entry -- calling attention to a 2-part discussion about existentialism, freedom, choice, and the success of the projects and commitments of a person. Here's part 1 and part 2.
We veered off into a discussion about the ways some people connect up radical human freedom (which existentialists do affirm) with personal responsibility for producing one's success or failure (not something existentialists think we have entire control over) during my latest talk, on Franz Kafka, in the Glimpses of Existence monthly lecture series hosted by the Kingston Library.
My view is that there is a kind of solipsism lurking within the claim that, because a person is free, they can make their destiny or fate simply by willing, desiring, or choosing -- that would be true, were solipsism, the view that one is really the only acting, real person in the world, true. But, we inhabit a world equally inhabited by others, who are also free -- indeed a world shaped mysteriously (and often frustratingly!) by other people's use of their own radical freedom (which in its turn is conditioned by still others, and others. . . )
Aug 22, 2014
The Iron Law of Ochlocracy (part 1)
This last week, with the exception of the night of my birthday, I've been attending a nightly series of stimulating lectures -- one of the benefits of being accorded Visiting Scholar status at European Graduate school this year -- one of which was delivered by Michael Hardt, probably best known outside of progressive and revolutionary academic circles for his collaborative work, Empire (with Antonio Negri).Hardt used the lecture as an opportunity to set out a project he has been working on, but has not yet consolidated into a fully polished form. The central question or problem was that of leadership among non-party, often-marginal, but revolutionary and radically democratic "leaderless movements," Occupy being the one most familiar to us Americans, but comprising a number of different, usually rather transient, and only occasionally effective movements worldwide over the last two decades or so.
Aug 18, 2014
Hello Again From Saas-Fee!
The medium in which I've done the most work in that time -- outside of the interactions of the classroom and course management system -- has been video, specifically producing, releasing, and curating mainly philosophy-related videos in my YouTube channel. But, I've also been engaged in considerably more public speaking, brought into interesting conversations as a consultant, and even found some time for working on a few articles and book chapters. At Google's invitation, I began offering 1-on-1 video Helpout sessions. I also became certified by the American Philosophical Practioner's Association in philosophical counseling -- something I'd found myself doing occasionally in less formal and structured ways for years -- and am now in process of developing a practice, based physically in the Hudson Valley, but virtually able to engage clients nearly anywhere in the world.
As exciting as everything has been, I've missed getting to do the kind of writing -- as well as resource development -- that the rather over-ambitiously rolled out blogs of the past afforded me chances to work on. So, as my 44th birthday, and along with it this trip over the Atlantic and across the Alps, approached, I decided it was time to start contributing to those electronic forums again -- as well as to reconsider and streamline their designs.
Sadler's Existentialist Updates needed attending to first, since I've been doing a lot of lecturing and course development precisely on that philosophical movement -- and after redesigning it in minor ways, I started writing again -- and, after a hiatus of ten months, it felt great to post content again! I also realized that I'd actually need to create another new blog, Half Hour Hegel, sooner than later in order to organize the video content of an ongoing, probably 3-year-to-complete series of a (projected) 250 to 300 videos working methodically through G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. So I did it.
The question was then which blog to start work on next. I'd hoped by this birthday I might find enough time to restart another blog that I had "given" myself as a kind of birthday present last year, Heavy Metal Philosopher -- and I am looking forward to getting to write again in that one soon. But, given the time that was available to me, it seemed to me that this one -- my longest running, my first, my most comprehensive site -- was really the one to refurbish and restart today.
As I write this, I'm high up in the Swiss Alps, in Saas-Fee, where European Graduate School has its campus, and where they are holding intensive classes and hosting lectures, taught by some of the cutting-edge theorists and practitioners of continental philosophy -- a program in which my wife and collaborator is enrolled. I'm here for her last week, attending some of the lectures, meeting and conversing with some of the students and professors, traipsing around the narrow mountain streets, gaping like a tourist up at the massive, snow-brilliant peaks, slowly recollecting enough of my German to get by in the shops, and doing some work of my own -- a bit of writing, shooting some video footage, and . . . well, this!
So I'll be back to using this as my sounding-board for ideas I'm working out or working on, occasional reflections on perennial matters spurred by current events, and for mentioning some of the other projects I've got going on, when there's something to say about them. There's a lot of forward movement, as they say, but that almost appears to require time as its fuel or compensation. Given the degree to which I'm finding those days, hours, and minutes allotted, demanded, parceled out, I expect I'm going to have to write in a somewhat less polished -- some might say, laborious -- style than that I've indulged myself in here during past years. But, perhaps that's all to the good . . .
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