Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.
January 19, 2018 – Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.
We have learned that the ocean waves pulverize our plastic debris which is then consumed as dust by the fish we eat. The circle is closed and the poisons we have created come back to us in this altered form. The internet pulverizes human knowledge and feeds it back to us as unconnected bits of information. Our minds are bound to be ultimately overwhelmed by all this new kind of poisonous debris.
My project is simple but demanding. I am trying to reread Wittgenstein from the beginning without, however, relying on any established interpretations. My question is whether we can look at his work with fresh eyes. Ignoring the halo of secondary writing that now surrounds that work. This does not mean that we will always end up disagreeing with previous interpreters. My plan is to re-discover their insights where they prove to be such and otherwise go my own way.
Political realism is what the hour calls for. But as soon as we say that, the questions multiply. To what does political realism commit us? What does it oppose? The term has already got a varied history. That a view conceives of itself as realist does not guarantee that it is. What is called “political realism” may actually stand in the way of a genuinely realistic grasp of political matters.
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics There is often a significant time lag between an idea and its expression. Being aware of that gap maybe necessary for appreciating the original idea for what it is. I am reminded of this in reading Raymond Geuss’ book Philosophy and Real Politics which…
“It is hard to see the citizenry of the United States at present as especially successful in furnishing themselves with good government under their uniquely time-tested and elastic democratic formula,” John Dunn, the English political theorist, observes in his profoundly unsettling book Breaking Democracy’s Spell
Can Democracy Work? is James Miller’s sequel to his book Democracy Is in the Streets of thirty years ago, In the intervening years he seems to have become less certain of the answer to the question whether democracy cam actually be made to work. The earlier book had been a…
“Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking? … We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession. But now we turn to our own country.”
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die
We are living today in a state of heightened uncertainty – not least when it comes to politics. Carl Schmitt’s and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the concept of the political illuminate why that is so.
You can’t make rules for a game, if you don’t know what game is being played.
Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis is a tightly argued new book by Ci Jiwei that sets itself the dual task of analyzing China’s democracy deficit while doing so in a genuinely philosophical manner. Such an exercise in a “diagnostic” style of political philosophy is greatly more challenging than the…
The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is calling for China to be “self-sufficient” in strategically important areas. There is talk also of an outright decoupling of the economic relationship of the US and China. At the same time, China is seeking to enhance its status as a global power. It is…
August 10, 2018
I travel to Hong Kong and plan to talk to Joshua Wong about the future of the city.
August 11, 2018
It is Saturday morning and I am about to meet up with Joshua Wong at the Bricklane Café right across from Hong Kong’s Legislature where Wong’s political party has its office. It turns out that Wong has already been at work that weekend morning and I am not the only visitor he will see that day.
I am curious to hear from him about the current state of Hong Kong politics.
There are plenty of reasons why we should be interested in China. It is the world’s most populous country with more than a billion people and it presents thus (together with India) a singular challenge as to how a state of such magnitude can be governed.
In his Tractatus Wittgenstein speaks both of the world and of descriptions of the world. I argue that his use of that second term derives from its occurrence in Alexander von Humboldt’s “Kosmos”.
On the gravestone of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke we can read one of his last poems which says: Oh rose, you pure contradiction. To be nobody’s sleep under so many eyelids.” Is there a self and if not, who am I?
