lepsia verzia v .txt: http://burundi.sk/dusan/carrythatweight/images/5/51/Pzi.esej.research.txt
premise: what if whitehead, not heidegger would set the agenda for postmodern thought?
INTRO
whitehead 861 aq 7 akbal IX – process and reality, 29
heidegger 889 li 11 cimi XI – being and time, 27
> both books = antiessentialist, antipositivist
1 q of beginnings
H’s first question of Being: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”
W begins with “How is it that there is always something new?”
How can our culture’s incessant repetition and recycling nonetheless issue forth in something genuinely new and different?
2 q of history of phil
H: where did phil got wrong path?
W: “It is really not sufficient to direct attention to the best that has been said and done in the an-
cient world. The result is static, repressive, and promotes a decadent habit of
mind.” Instead of trying to pin down the history of philosophy, Whitehead
twists this history in wonderfully ungainly ways. He mines it for unexpected
creative sparks, excerpting those moments where, for instance, Plato affirms
Becoming against the static world of Ideas, or Descartes refutes mind–body
dualism.
^ nedebugovat linearnu historiu filozofie, ale nachadzat unexpected threads (ako 3hoursold v jpg ekologii)
3 W doesn’t talk about metaphysics
5 q of style
H: Heidegger’s contorted writing combines a height-
ened Romantic poeticism with the self-referential interrogation of linguistic
roots and meanings. It’s a style as portentous and exasperating as the myster-
ies it claims to disclose.
W’s language, to the contrary, is dry, gray,
and abstract. But in this academic, fussy, almost pedantic prose, he is contin-
ually saying the most astonishing things, reigniting the philosophic sense of
wonder at every step.
7 q of technology
H warns us against the danger of technological “enframing,” with its reduction of nature to the status of a “standing reserve.”
Heidegger ought to treat science and technology in the same way that he treats language: for language it-
self is a technology, and the essence of what is human involves technology in
just the same way as it does language
W: scientific and technical rationality is one kind of “abstraction.” This, in itself, is not anything bad.
8 q of subjectivity
Whitehead does not see the subject as an effect of
language. Rather, he sees subjectivity as embedded in the world. The subject
is an irreducible part of the universe, of the way things happen. There is noth-
ing outside of experience; and experience always happens to some subject or
other. This subject may be human, but it also may be a dog, a tree, a mush-
room, or a grain of sand. (Strictly speaking, any such entities are what White-
head calls “societies,” each composed of multitudes of “actual occasions,”
which themselves are the subjects in question.)
^ !! societies = objects composed of events(?) ??is he flat?? (flat ontology like early latour, and delanda)
+
In any case, the subject consti-
tutes itself in and through its experience; and thereupon it perishes, entering
into the “objective immortality” of being a “datum” for other experiences of
other subjects. In this way, Whitehead abolishes the ontological privileging of
human beings over all other subjectivities. This doesn’t mean, of course, that
the differences between human beings and other sorts of beings are irrelevant;
such differences remain pragmatically important in all kinds of situations, and
for all sorts of reasons. But in undoing the ontological privilege of being hu-
man, Whitehead suggests that the critique of the subject need not be so com-
pulsive a focus of philosophical inquiry.
Whitehead’s metaphysics stands outside the dualities—the subject or not, meaning
or not, humanism or not—with which recent theoretical thought has so often
burdened us.
Whitehead both exemplifies, and encourages, the virtues of speculation, fabulation, and invention.
Deleuze’s affinity with Whitehead lies, above all, in his focus on affect
and singularity, as a way of working toward a nondialectical and highly aes-
theticized mode of critique.
aim of S’s book: critical aestheticism.
W: “Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth,” and even
“Beauty is . . . the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying.”
Kant: Beauty cannot be judged according to concepts; it is a matter neither of em-
pirical fact, nor of moral obligation. This is why there is no science of the
beautiful. For Kant, aesthetics has no foundation, and it offers us no guaran-
tees. Rather, it throws all norms and values into question, or into crisis.
Beauty, Kant says, is not cognitive, not conceptual. “A judgment of
taste is not based on determinate concepts”; that is to say, the concept behind
such a judgment (if it can be called a “concept” at all) “does not allow us to
cognize and prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically
indeterminable and inadequte for cognition” (Kant 1987, 213). There is no
objective or scientific way to determine whether an object is beautiful, and—
if it is—to explain why.
+
beauty is not objectively there, in the world. It is not in nature; it is rather
something that we attribute to nature. An aesthetic judgment, therefore, is
one “whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective”
..Yet at the same time, beauty isn’t merely subjective.
ENDOF INTRO