“When he [Hegel] was writing the Phenomenology he had an affair with the wife of his landlord (resulting in the birth of his illegitimate sone, Ludwig Fischer), so it could be said that the Phenomenology was the child of a love affair, adultery, indeed the ‘child of love’, as the Logic was very much the legitimate child, born in proper wedlock. Marriages tend to appear so much less exciting than love affairs, although this is a very non-Hegelian view (and maybe this is what secretly subtends the frequent view that tends to see the Phenomenology as an exciting love-affair and the Logic as a dull marriage, or as dull as a marriage).”

Mladen Dolar, Being and MacGuffin

We are now pretending the words legal status for illegal immigrants isn’t the definition of amnesty. Words no longer have definitions.

The operative difference between this time that Trump said is going to deliver amnesty and all the other times is that this time the Democrats have a sweeping majority in Congress.

I’m kind of disturbed by the people calling Trump Jewish for not forgiving his enemies in the comments. Trump is some sort of pagan morally speaking.

Socrates interviews Polemarchus 411 BCE (colorized)

I actually do like Douthat as an interviewer. He has this coy, knowing smile on his face as he asks probing questions he already knows the answer to. He doesn’t need to speak to the camera to communicate his feelings to the audience. Maybe it helps that he’s about as handsome as Socrates.

President Trump thinks he lost the midterm elections for Republicans because he deported too many people and didn’t drop enough bombs on Tehran.

Kind of struck me that Trump’s near-death experience in Butler, instead of causing him to soberly reflect on his life and re-evaluate his trajectory as it would for most people, infused his already bloated ego with the invincible confidence that he could take every inane risk imaginable and suffer no consequences.

He’s like crossing off his bucket list to see what stuff he can see get away with at this point.

Always remember

In a world where we have a solidly blue Congress, it’s not exactly good that the President is entertaining the possibility of an amnesty “deal.”

I suppose what makes it worse is that, due to the rampant corruption that’s been allowed to fester unchecked in the administration for 2 years, corruption that Trump’s own children are undoubtedly involved in, Democrats probably have leverage over him.

In the same interview, only a question prior, he talks about how people are turned off by his “bad messaging.”

Unfortunately, lion.

It is natural that the people who think that the meaning of the world ends and begins with petty politics are also those would accuse anyone who doesn’t support their favored political candidate and/or party of relapsing into nihilism.

If they were to lose their saecularized-religious fixation, their mortal God behind the podium, the world would become barren of meaning overnight.

People often imply the planican and the panican are two different people but really they are just one person at different stages of impotence.

People were really celebrating Stephen Miller becoming Chief of Staff thinking it would change anything.

Stephen Miller only cares about two things and both start with the letter i.

A few years ago, Charlie Kirk passionately defended Dave Chappelle after he was attacked on the job by an armed lunatic who meant to take his life for remarks he had made about transgender people.

The same thing happens to Charlie Kirk, only Kirk isn’t so lucky, and Chappelle celebrating.

“I cannot make out your catastrophe explanation of ‘hermeneutic ontology.’ My opinion is, as the Introduction explains, the opposite. I do not believe at all that we live ‘between’ two worlds. I can follow neither Heidegger nor Buber in this. Only the prophet who already sees the e, in my estimation, the possibility to say the like. I remember, instead of this, the one world which I alone know, and which in all decay has lost far less of its evidence and cohesion than it talks itself into… ‘completed experience,’ is the ‘completion’ of he who does not bar himself through dogmatics from experience that should be undergone. It is the opposite of an end of experiences!)

Perhaps the tendency of my book will become clearer to you if I add: I have advocated against Heidegger for decades, that also his ‘bound’ or ‘leap’ back behind metaphysics is alone made possible through this itself (historically operative consciousness!). What I believe to have understood through Heidegger (and what I can testify to from my protestant background) is, above all, that philosophy must learn to do without the idea of an infinite intellect. I have attempted to draw up a corresponding hermeneutics. But I can only do that, in that I — much against Heidegger’s intentions — make visible in such a hermeneutic consciousness in the end everything that I see. I believe really to have understood the late Heidegger, i.e., his ‘truth.’ But I must ‘prove’ it to myself — with the experience which is my own, and that is what I have called ‘hermeneutic experience.’”

Hans-George Gadamer, Correspondence with Leo Strauss (April 5, 1961)

It is my disposition that we be suspicious of suspicion and unprejudiced against prejudice.

In his OP, @philliplede writes:

"If such a preliminary understanding (from the historical vantage of the author) is impossible, then any serious understanding of the thought of antiquity is also, necessarily, impossible.

Strauss delivers over to historicism its victory in demanding such impossible standards from its alternative.

The evidence Strauss avails himself of in alleged counter-evidence to the relativizing impulse of historicism is equally historical."

His objection is that, if Strauss's effort to "understand an author as he understood himself" is an impossible "ideal" (akin to the "asymptotic knowledge" of Paul Natorp, with whom Strauss studied), then Strauss's anti-historicist standpoint must be a "Knowledge Equation" of "an Infinite Task" (unendliche Aufgabe).

As G.W.F. Hegel had argued against J.G. Fichte, the problem with such an Infinite Task is that it produces a "Bad Infinity" (schlechte Unendlichkeit), which repeatedly finitizes the infinite in a continual approach to a goal that it never truly reaches. Because it never reaches its goal, it necessarily fails to know the truth of its object and, as such, is false.

Accordingly, if Strauss's anti-historicism can only approach but never reach such an impossible ideal, then his exegetical standpoint, of seeking to know authors as they knew themselves, must be caught in a typical Neo-Kantian "Knowledge Equation" of "an Infinite Task." Moreover, it cannot, in any conventional sense, be adequately proportioned to an object of knowledge that it never claims to truly know.

Following Heidegger against Cassirer, Strauss attempts in 'Natural Right and History' to break from this Neo-Kantian problematic by reorienting history to the zetetic heights of a canon of political theorists (e.g., Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, etc.).

Yet if, in renouncing constitutive knowledge of universal ideas, his zetetical dialectic remains skeptical, and in reorienting history to this canon he surreptitiously re-historicizes the past as a guide for present inquiries, then, as Gadamer had suggested, Strauss appears as a kind of inverted and abortive Hegelian - one who, without claiming Absolute Knowledge of the Idea of God, nevertheless purports to hold the master hermeneutic key to uncovering the trans-historical secrets of universal natural rights.