josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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24 Jan '13 11:44:13 PM

'I didn't realize you two knew each other.'

24 Jan '13 10:44:56 PM

Words as friends, enemies, followers, hangers-on, with affinities true or assumed.

Words whose marriages are those of convenience alone.

Words on whose behalf we pressure other words to stay in line. Words who have been pressed into our schemes.

Words who bear false witness.

Families of words, with their histories, and their patterns, too old to change.

Language as an occupying population, speakers whose words convict them as loyalists.

Language as a big noisy party you show up late to.

Words who are happy to help and words who are under-sung.

Celebrity words. Words we want nothing to do with.

Words we will stand with, words everyone wants to be seen with.

Roving gangs of words.

24 Jan '13 08:08:44 PM

Not the other, rather no other—regardless of who's around.

24 Jan '13 07:16:36 AM

'Even ending in the sense of disappearing can still be modified according to the kind of being of the being. The rain is at an end, that is, it has disappeared. The bread is at an end, that is, used up, no longer available as something at hand.'

24 Jan '13 06:27:35 AM

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a Foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt, now containing 'possibloity' (§47, II.I, SZ 240) and 'prenetrating interpretation' (§51, II.I, SZ 255).

24 Jan '13 04:18:01 AM

'The German impersonal continues to play a central role in Heidegger's terminology to the very end of his career. Out of German neo-Kantianism, and more basically out of ordinary German and its vast pool of impersonals, Heidegger has found his very first and most perduring formally indicative grammatical form. Like "It's raining!" in English, "It" points to a most singular, unique, and comprehensive Event happening now. What is this mysterious It, no longer a substantifying It but a sheer Event, when it is directed to the sheer fact of life, of being, of being here and now? How are we to talk about It, even name It in its simple but comprehensive happening, find a language for It, such that we are not constantly seduced by the substantifying tendency that the very term "It" itself brings with it? Ontologically different from things, subjectless as well as objectless, how to return to this obviously primary but mysterious "something" of life and sheer being which "takes place," happens to me, like a Big Bang or sudden onslaught of being (Es blitzt, "it flashes like lightning," already in 1914: FS 126)? Life befalls me, anonymously, impersonally. I am of It, I find myself in It willy-nilly, already under way in existence. This is the pretheoretical "hold" that Heidegger is giving already in KNS to the wholly theoretical neo-Kantian "It holds," the It that empowers theoretical judgments in their truth, as he backtracks phenomenologically, with Eckhartian overtones, to the more primal empowering It of life and Its truth, Its ontological difference from beings. Throughout his long career, Heidegger will never seek to surpass this central insight which gives priority to the impersonal event enveloping the I which "takes place" in that Event. He will never in any way moderate or mitigate this lifelong fascination with the impersonal sentence which proliferates in the German language, this German infection which he picked up in his early neo-Kantian years. The original something is an original motion, the facticity of our being is an event or happening, the facticity of Time itself. And the most direct, indicative, way which Heidegger finds to simply name this It which happens to us, to point to its sheer action, to attempt to describe its character and basic tenor, is the German impersonal sentence.'

24 Jan '13 02:47:03 AM

'Forms of life' are taken to be foundational. But instead of serving as ultimate grounds they can be taken as that thanks to which one stays grounded; and comes back to earth.

24 Jan '13 02:01:22 AM

PI §20: 'But then is there not also something different going on in him when he pronounces it—something corresponding to the fact that he conceives the sentence as a single word?'

He has gone through something different; he went through it before he came to be able to pronounce the sentence the way he does.

24 Jan '13 12:59:11 AM

Things can be overrefined.