Monthly Archives: June 2008
Self-Correction on Derrida and Anglo-American Commentary on Kant’s Aesthetics (http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html)
Kierkegaard and the Literature of Manners. http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/6/23_.html
Kirkegaard and James Joyce: Finnegans Wake is a Kierkegaardian Novel
Joyce’s notoriously complex last ‘novel’, Finnegans Wake is in some ways a novel after Kierkegaard, particularly the Kierkegaard of Either/Or I. This volume in Kierkegaard is an exploration of the aesthetic, but it should not be separated from his ethical and religious dimensions, and it should not be given a lower status than those texts of Kierkegaard which are more directly about ethics and religious. If Kierkegaard thought these distinctions could be kept so strictly he would not have written the kind of texts he did.
Leaving aside questions of Kierkegaard commentary aside in this entry, we should note the presence of Kierkegaard and Either/Or in Finnegans Wake. On many occasions Joyce refers to ‘Kirk yard’, a play on the meaning of Kierkegaard’s name (church yard) and its closeness to Scots (the dialect of English spoken, some would claim it’s a language distinct from English though related to it, in lowland Scotland and Ulster) which has many Scandinavian influences going back to the Vikings. There are other points about that little example of Joyce’s extreme polyglot linguistic play in the Wake. The allusions to church and the church yard where the dead are buried brings out themes of the sacred, death and the commemoration of death which recur in the Wake. Joyce also frequently plays with Enten-Eller, which is the Danish title of Either/Or. The whole of the Wake can be looked upon as an attempt to follow up the idea of a purely aesthetic attitude which Kierkegaard explored in Either/Or I, and shortly before that in Concept of Irony. What he was particularly concerned with was he the Irony of the Jena Romantics or Romantic Ironists, Friedrich Schegel, Novalis and others who collaborated in the last two years of the Eighteenth Century. Concept of Irony makes this explicit and consider the relation of Romantic Irony with Fichte’s earlier philosophy, and in a more general way with Socratic Irony.
A particular issue that comes up from Eiher/Or in the Wake is the relation between hearing and vision. There are frequent references to eye and ear in the Wake which should be read in conjunction with the discussion of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in Either/Or. One of Kierkegaard’s concerns is the relation between seeing and hearing in opera, a tense relation for him as opera has an obvious visual aspect but Kierkegaard thinks music is primary in opera and that is exemplified in Don Giovanni. The figure of the Don serves that because he is pure sensuality and music appeals to the most pure sensuality, The erotic side of the Don fits with the heightened aesthetic of opera. The Wake is concerned in many ways with the relation between sound and inscription in language. Don Juan/Don Giovanni is also a recurring figure who seems to belong to a general theme of the journey of life and essential human struggle.
Why closing Turkey’s AKP would be a liberal act. John Stuart Mill would have agreed.
Theories of Representative Democracy or Republicanism have not been concerned with a a majoritarian theory in which the most popular force in politics has the right to decide everything. That is the path that led to the execution of Socrates in Ancient Athens. In Aristotle, Monteseuiu, Mill and many others, democracy is a means to promote liberty. For Mill, it was quite necessary to push the conditions for secular liberty from above, and democracy rested on those conditions. Like all the Liberal and Republican thinkers, he thought that liberty and law are the necessary foundations of any democracy worth having, that is a democracy that is not mere majoritarianism. AKP are eroding the conditions for secular democracy. The Millian response is clear. The democratic means for liberty can be highly regarded but they are means. Mill followed Tocqueille’s phrase, tyranny of the majority, which itself probably has some origin in the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Madison and Jay. The point in all case is that momentary majority opinion is a very dangerous thing which can lead to violence and law breaking. Authority is necessary to stop the majority,or the shifting nature of majority opinion, from violating basic freedoms. Previous Liberal and Republican thinkers have said similar thing about majority democracy. Even Rousseau though that the general ill is only formed when citizens are isolated from each other, and engages with the necessity of different parts of sovereignty. AKP is a threat to the secular foundations of democracy and should go.
Kierkegaard: Free Will and Ethics
What is important about Kierkegaard’s philosophy, including his ethics? Is is it that he has a Christian message? No. Of course he had a deeply Christian message but what is important is the ways in which he expressed it through aesthetics, psychology, ethical, metaphysical and epistemic theory.
I’m now posting the blog at http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html
I’m experimenting with the blogging facilities provided by .mac, an Apple service which integrates with the iWeb application in the iLife suite on Macintosh computers. If this works well I will migrate this blog entirely to the address in the title using the name Barry Stocker’s Weblog
Using a Macintosh
I’ve now been using a MacBook (white 2.4 GHz) for about 4 weeks. The MacBook is the basic Apple Macintosh laptop/notebook computer. It’s been a highly positive experience with the hardware and with the Mac OS X.5 Leopard software. The MacBook is very portable, not as portable as the MacBook Air but very portable by most standards. I’ve been carrying it round with a shoulder bag and hardly felt the weight. I’ve edited documents and watched dvds on it in quite cramped conditions on long distance buses. It fits nicely on the lap without feeling much weight and does not create too much heat, certainly when my legs are covered. OS X takes some getting used to after years of exclusively Windows experience but it is not a very steep learning curve. I put some labour into the process through a study of David Pogue’s Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual (O’Reilly and Partners).