Monday, August 16, 2021

Three Poem Drafts

 Misty Moon

The moon peeks through my window,
sweet and flirty-shy,
swinging like an angel
in a warm and humid sky,
halo all around it
like a temple-presence deep,
the mist of holy ages
and dreams that never sleep.

Bear you any message,
O moon in cloudy-shadowed skies?
Yea, O mortal hero:
What waxes, wanes and dies.


Argos

A puppy he was, two decades past;
hardly had he known his master's gentle hand.
He had passed his hunting years, his solar days,
long ago by a dog's count, and was old and tired,
and, no master to care for him in his age, abandoned,
weak and tick-infested, as untended, unloved dogs are.

He lay by the door and endured the time till death.

But once a scent familiar tickled his nose;
once a stranger who was not a stranger passed by.

Two paired eyes met and knew each other,
dog and man, both no more like themselves,
both changed by years, as years only can change.

The ears dropped. 

The tail wagged a thump.

The legs struggled to raise the old body,
but soon gave up, for lack of a pup's strength.

Then Argos passed into darkness, one last sigh,
fulfilling his faithful fate with a dog's faith.


Starry Sky

The world that shines
within my eye
is bright;
it gleams and glows
like flakes of snow
to sight
in twinkled stars,
those angel-hearts,
tonight.

M ↓   Markdown
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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)

I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.

I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.

Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.

Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.