David Albert Rathbone

Synopsis

The Eleatic advance over Homeric epic was to bring the phenomenon of the finitude of existence into view in terms of logos and not just mythos.  In seeing that being is bound to appearance not accidentally but in essence, Parmenides confronts limits of thought which were destined for modern resurgence in the wake of the demise of the epochal dominance of the Platonic understanding of the meaning of being.  Despite this dominance, the phenomenon of radical finitude reappears in the philosophy of Leibniz, shaped in part by Europe's more or less sudden discovery of Chinese culture in the seventeenth century.  The European debates concerning the nature of Chinese thought reveal a struggle in the Western imagination to come to terms with this discovery, a struggle radical enough in retrospect to warrant description as the “re-orientation of the occident.”  This re-orientation led inexorably to Kant's epoch-inaugurating realization of the role of transcendental imagination in the constitution of temporality, which was a realignment of our understanding of our limitations no less radical than had been Parmenides'.

Heidegger's phenomenology of human finitude recounts this same history instead as the series of three increasingly errant interpretations of the meaning of being - being as revealing/concealing in ancient Greece, being as creation in post-classical, pre-modern Christian Europe, and being as production under modernity.  In order to enable a showing of this phenomenon of the historicity of the meaning of being "from out of itself," Heidegger undertakes his project of the "retrieval" and "destruction" of these three meanings which have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy.  Beginning from our own modern understanding of being in terms of production, I retrace Heidegger's steps as he thinks his way backwards, first back into the pre-Modern understanding of being as creation, and then back a second time into the pre-Socratic experience of being as a dynamic balance (kosmos) of revealing and concealing of the contrast between production and creation in understanding the poesis we call seeing the whole (i.e. thinking about being).

This path of retrieval is found to converge not upon a pure origin of the thinking of original being in Parmenides, as Heidegger seems to maintain, but rather to lead us to the thought of the operation of mixture in the core of metaphysics, and in particular, to the thought of the mixture of contrasts arising in the epochal intersection of Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon cultures, from which the modern Germanic languages, including German and English, have arisen.  The significance of that original fold in the history of thought mirrors the significance of the folding underway for us today, as Western philosophy continues to come to terms with Eastern ways of thinking about being, and a cultural interaction is occurring whose significance for the future is destined to become as consequential one day as the meeting of the Classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds in first-century Britain is for our present today.

The Eleatic advance over Homeric epic was to bring the phenomenon of the finitude of existence into view in terms of logos and not just mythos. In seeing that being is bound to appearance not accidentally but in essence, Parmenides confronts limits of thought which are destined for modern resurgence in the wake of the epochal dominance of the Platonic understanding of the meaning of being. The phenomenon of radical finitude reappears in the philosophy of Leibniz, shaped in part by Europe's more or less sudden discovery of Chinese culture, a culture no less ancient than its own existing on the other side of a world, the whole of which had finally been appreciated to be a globe. The European debates concerning the nature of Chinese thought reveal a struggle in the Western imagination to come to terms with this discovery, fundamental enough to be described as a "re-orientation of the occident." This reorientation leads inexorably to Kant's epochal realisation of the role of transcendental imagination in the constitution of temporality, which is an understanding of limitation constituting a confrontation with the limits of thought no less radical than Parmenides'. Having thus traced a path through philosophy's history of attempts to understand the imperative to see the whole, Heidegger's phenomenology of human finitude recounts this history in order to enable a realization of the historicity of the meaning of being itself, and is thus a project of the retrieval of these meanings, which have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy. Apprehending our own modern understanding of being in terms of production, I follow Heidegger as he attempts to think his way first back into the pre-modern understanding of being as creation, and then back again into the pre-Socratic experience of being as a balance (kosmos) of absence and presence, revealing and concealing. But this path of retrieval is found to converge not upon a pure origin in Parmenides, but rather to lead to the thought of the operation of mixture in the source of our metaphysics, and in particular upon the mixed contrasts arising in the epochal crossing of Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon cultures from which modern Germanic languages have arisen. The significance of that fundamental fold in the history of thought mirrors the significance of the fold still underway for us today, as Western philosophy continues to come to terms with Eastern ways of thinking about being, and a cultural interaction takes place whose significance for the future is destined to become as consequential as the meeting of the Classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds in first-century Britain has been for us

The recent publications of four new translations of Thus Spake Zarathustra, one by Thomas Wayne (2003), one by Graham Parkes (2004), one by Clancy Martin (2005), and one by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin (2006) provides an opportunity to comment upon a translation issue now exhibited consistently across all nine English translations. This issue concerns the translation of the term das Kinder Land, a compound noun which first appears in Book Two of TSZ, in the chapter entitled "Vom Lande der Bildung". In translating this compound noun, English translators have all opted to follow Alexander Tille's use of the objective genitive construction “children's land.” But just as “father's land” does not quite capture the rich nuances resonating in the term "das Vaterland," and likewise “mother's land” fails fully to capture the complexities of the term "das Mutterland," just so “children's land” is too literal a rendering to capture what Nietzsche means by "das Kinder Land."

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche in prophetic mode envisioned a day in which chairs in philosophy would be endowed in Universities devoted to the interpretation of his work. Half a century later, Nietzsche's vision materialized temporarily at Princeton University in the shape of Walter Kaufmann, a brilliant bi-lingual German-born Jew, able to explain how the invasions worked by the Nazis also included an intellectual dimension, for they had annexed not only neighbouring countries, but also previous thinkers, forcing them into collaboration with their insidious plans. In post-war America, Walter Kaufmann led the effort of liberation necessary to emancipate Nietzsche from this outrage, and could be said to have chaired a metaphorical committee of de-Nazification which examined how the awful collaboration began through the efforts of Nietzsche's brother-in-law Bernard, his sister Elizabeth, and their hero, Richard Wagner. A crucial aspect of Kaufmann's work consisted in disentangling Nietzsche from this morass of proto-Nazi foment engulfing him, an environment Nietzsche himself had been fully aware of as highly toxic, and the nightmarish aspects of which must now be admitted to have played a part in his mental breakdown of January 1889.

Nietzsche lamented readers who approach texts like plundering troops, aiming to get in, grab what they can, and get out again as quickly as possible (Human All Too Human
, IIa, #137). Hegel is such a reader’s worst nightmare. His writings are voluminous, dense and complicated, his style demanding that the reader share the author’s work ethic by toiling over the text. But if Hegel is the opportunist’s nightmare,he is also the grammatologist’s dream, “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” (Of Grammatology p.26). So meticulous are his analyses, so reflexive his thought, and so remarkable his feats of synthesis, that his work fascinates Derrida like a bed rich in fossils might fascinate a paleontologist. Here in “Hegel” are fixed the complex traces of a focal point of reflexivity so intense that in it the reader's thought itself mutates in ways still not yet fully fathomed. In Hegel’s thought, linear Christian eschatology, the official metaphysics of Europe since the demise of the Classical world, folds back on itself in complications which gave rise to the evolutionary world-view which superseded it. In following Derrida reading Hegel, we shall be dwelling upon both the ways in which Hegel cannot actually achieve all he thinks he can, as well as the ways in which he cannot think all that he actually achieves.

In this course we shall trace the evolution of the concept of the virtual from Bergson to Deleuze, before turning to consider the question of time in Whitehead, Russell and Wittgenstein. These various ways of thinking of time and the virtual will then serve as our guide as we consider the cosmologies of two contemporary physicists: Eric Lerner and Julian Barbour. In conclusion we will consider whether we've found what Einstein and Goedel were looking for in their Kant reading group. Lecture One-Proust and Bergson: or, why we were already virtual.

"Was? Du suchst? Du möchtest dich verzehnfachen, verhundertfachen? Du suchtst Anhänger? - Suche N u l l e n! - "(Twilight of the Idols "Maxims and Arrows" §14)
Blunt statement: anyone calling themselves (or others) "Nietzscheans" thereby demonstrate that they do not understand Nietzsche. I attempt to whittle this blunt statement into the point of this lecture, namely that autonomy leads us beyond the "führer" principle in philosophy, and so if we say we are followers of Nietzsche, we thereby betray him. The question is not who Nietzsche followed, but what he overcame (or tried to). In this hour I address four of Nietzsche's overcomings on the way to autonomy:
1. Overcoming slavery
2. Overcoming Hegel
3. Overcoming Darwin
4. Overcoming absolutism
To end a lecture on overcoming teleology with a conclusion would be an ultimate betrayal, so instead I finish with some thoughts about Santa Claus, symbolism, orientation and games.

"When asked in the 1970s if he thought the French Revolution had succeeded or failed, Mao Tse Tung famously answered ‘It's too soon to tell’. The complexities of the compact knot of history from 1793 to 1812 are involved enough to allow of a multiplicity of interpretations and the decisions we make in making these interpretations remain in turn decisive for our self-understanding today. As a focal figure concentrating the contradictions of his times, Napoleon Bonaparte can himself be viewed from several different perspectives.

In the first three lectures, we shall consider the different perspectives of Hegel, of Goethe, and of Nietzsche upon Napoleon, exploring the contrasting significance Napoleon had for each of these three thinkers. Then in the final lecture, we shall consider Napoleon's perspective upon himself through a look at his autobiography and his other literary works.


Sun 9 Sep, 2–4pm: Hegel's Napoleon
Hegel tells us that he was just writing the final lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the morning of October 14th 1806 when he heard the first shots of the battle of Jena commencing on a plateau outside of town. The battle raged all day, and by the end of the afternoon, the Prussian troops (including a young Friedrich Gabriel von Clausewitz) were in chaos and Napoleon had triumphed. We shall consider why Hegel took Napoleon to be nothing less than the flesh and blood incarnation of the World Spirit itself, and attempt to make explicit the understanding of the French Revolution implicit in the chapter of the Phenomenology entitled “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” In conclusion, we shall consider the possibility that it was Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 (in which Hegel's own brother perished, and of which the diary of H.A. Vossler provides a vivid period portrait) which led to the turn from organic holism to totalitarian thinking exhibited in the step from paragraph 346 to paragraph 347 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.


Sun 16 Sep, 2–4pm: Goethe's Napoleon
Goethe and Napoleon met in the September of 1808, and Napoleon surprised Goethe by telling him that he had read The Sorrows of Young Werther no less than seven times with ever greater admiration for its author, but that he had one specific criticism. Although Goethe says that he found that criticism ‘perfectly just’, he nevertheless avoided ever specifying its exact nature (even to Eckermann), reporting only Napoleon's words ‘La politique est la fatalité’. In this lecture we shall play the guessing game Goethe has set for us, considering what clues we can find in Voltaire's Mahomet, in Rousseau's Social Contract and in the character of Euphorion in Part II Act III of Faust. In conclusion, we shall contrast Hegel's characterization of Napoleon as the World Spirit incarnate with Goethe's interpretation of him as the Spirit of Action, drawing out the implications of this subtle but crucial difference in terminology.


Sun 23 Sep, 2–4pm: Nietzsche's Napoleon
In Essay I Section 16 of his crucial late work The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says ‘Napoleon appeared as a man more unique and more late-born for his times than ever a man had been before him; and in him the problem of the noble ideal itself was made flesh – just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of Unmensch und Übermensch.’ In this lecture we shall look at Nietzsche's aphorisms on Napoleon in Human All Too Human, Dawn and the Gay Science,as well as dipping into Zarathustra, in order to understand Nietzsche's ideal of nobility and to try to rise to Nietzsche's challenge to ‘just think what a problem that is’, all the while also remembering what he says in aphorism 284 of The Wanderer and His Shadow (‘The Means to Real Peace’). By harnessing the contradiction between Nietzsche's pacifism and his apparent militarism, we are driven to confront Napoleon as Nietzsche's answer to the ‘delusion in the theory of revolution’ (Human All Too Human 463), and led to consider the possibility of a pacifism suspicious of its own idealism.


Sun 30 Sep, 2–4pm: Napoleon's Napoleon
Napoleon's Autobiography is itself a document susceptible of several interpretations. After contrasting Hegel's, Goethe's and Nietzsche's perspectives upon Napoleon, we shall finally consider Napoleon's self-interpretation, and through reflection upon Napoleon's interpretation of himself, attempt in turn to arrive at our own interpretation of what the various representations of Napoleon presented in the exhibition might symbolize for each of us.  Our aim in this last lecture shall be to deepen our own perspective upon Napoleon, not in order to decide which of the possible perspectives is ‘the right one’, but rather in order to make clear to ourselves what our differences in interpretation signify, and most importantly of all, what they imply for our possible futures."

Klimt, Wittgenstien, and Vienna.
4 Lectures for the NGV "Vienna: Art and Design" exhibition, 18 June - 9 Oct 2011.
Dr. David Rathbone (B.Sc.,M.Sc.,M.A.,Ph.D.)

The enigmatic artist Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) and the elusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) are two of the brightest stars to have arisen from the intense period of illumination and creativity which flourished in Vienna during the last decades of the Habsburg Empire (1895-1914). In these four lectures we will explore both the common background of their works and the inter-related foreground of their lives, with the aim of setting ourselves down on the ground of their discoveries.


Lecture 1 Klimt: I am not interested in myself.
A clue to understanding Klimt's art is to be found in the fact that unlike his contemporaries such as van Gough, Munch, Picasso and Gauguin, Klimt painted no self portraits. The significance of this gesture becomes apparent only through understanding Klimt's context. As a child of an impoverished goldsmith, Klimt approached art from the perspective of the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, a trade school which he entered at the age of 14, learning the techniques of fresco and mosaic in which creativity remains closely wedded to technical capacities. Leaving school sets up the Kuenstler-Compagnie with his brother, Klimt worked on various State commissions from 1879 for decorations and frescos. This led up to a commission in 1897 to design a triptych ceiling mural for the new Great Hall at Vienna University, illustrating the faculties of Medicine, Philosophy and Law. With the unveiling of these works, Klimt's run of success ended abruptly: the public, the professors and the critics were united in their horror of Klimt's overtly sexual nudes. Klimt's status fell almost overnight from an official artist of the Emporer, to that of bête noir and disillusioned outsider, painting "The Goldfish" and founding the Vienna Succession.

Lecture 2 Klimt: Art is great when it is atemporal and revolutionary.
On 3 April 1897, a new art society calling itself the Junge Welden ("Young Whelps") lodged notification with the Society of Viennese Artists of their inauguration. Following the lead of the Munich Sucession of 1892 and the Berlin Succession of 1893, Klimt and his band of a dozen outsiders broke away from the Viennese academic art establishment, reaching right over the Rannaisance sacred to the academics to grasp the living meaning of Roman history for contemporary Austria. They erected their Sucession Building designed by Hans Olbrich on 29 October 1898, which housed Klimt's monumental Beethoven Frieze (exhibited 1902, re-erected 1986) and started the magazine Ver Sacrum. We will follow Klimt's later work with the Vienna Workshop and the Stoclet Palace in seach of his contributions to the important idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, paying special attention to the motif of the passionate embrace, from the Philosophy "Faculty Panel" through to the "Kiss for the Whole World" in the Beethoven Frieze, to "Love" (1895), to his famous "The Kiss" (1907-8), to the Stocelet Palace "Embrace", reflecting upon Spinoza and Nietzsche on the body, the mysterious relation of Being and appearance, and upon Klimt's portartit of Wittgenstin's sister, Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905).

Lecture 3 Wittgenstein: The world is all that is the case.
Although usually interpreted in the context of the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarkable book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus owes as much to Vienna as it does to Cambridge. Although Wittgenstein wrote no conventional "aesthetic theory" or "ethical theory", his philosophy is an implicit critique of the very possibility of such theory, and thereby a showing of what Wittgenstein thought it was futile to try to say - namely, what the nature of art is, in its inextricable entanglement with ethics. The structure of Wittgenstein's systematic prose aims to speak for itself, and in coming to appreciate the context of Wittgenstein's work, we will aim to attune our sensibility such that we will have ears to hear and eyes to see what Wittgenstin means. The philosophies of Keirkegaard and of Schopenhauer shal be discussed as background in their relation to Kant and to Hegel, as well as the influences of such diverse Viennese figures of the time as Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Gustave Klimt, Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Ernst Mach, Robert Musil, Heinrich Herz, Ludwig Bultzmann and Albert Einstein.

Lecture 4 Wittgenstein: What is a paradigm?
Lichtenberg resurrected the ancient Greek grammatical catagory "paradigm" in his aphorisms, a concept important to the later Wittgenstein in his book the Philosophical Investigations (upon which he was still working when he died in 1951). Wittgenstein's use of the term contrasts in an interesting way with that of Gorgio Agamben in the first chapter of his book The Signature of All Things. We will consider the Junge Welden in relation to both Wittgenstein's and Agamben's meanings of the term "paradigm", contrast it with Thomas Kuhn's quite different one, and consider the case of the Viennese artist of the Blaue Reiter group who was also a philosopher and famous composer, Arnold Schoenberg.