Philosophy Thought Experiment: Nietzsche's Allegory of the Demon

Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous articulation of eternal recurrence of the same is imagined as a thought experiment.
The question Nietzsche poses is, ‘Would you live this life over again under the same conditions?’
After reading the quote, think of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day and the allegory makes more sense.

 

Here is an excerpt from the text:

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, s.341

translated by Walter Kaufmann

Source: Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Random House, 1974. Print.

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image source: fractal ontology

Cinema Paradiso: The Best Ending in a Film

One of the best endings in cinematic history is Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988).

First, There is the Film's Score
     The score by Ennio Morricone is the most moving cinematic piece ever produced for the silver screen. The music is deliberately made to induce emotions, and I think it adds to this movie's overall sympathetic tone.
Second, There is the Film's Meta-ending 
     To fully appreciate the ending, one has to watch the entire movie. The last scene is a kind-of-love-letter to cinema itself. As a boy, the protagonist, Totò, befriends his hometown's cinema projectionist, Alfredo. In this small skirt of a town in rural Italy, the Catholic Church has considerable sway over what her parishioners can watch at the local cinema. The parish priest personally censors the films on view and directs Alfredo to edit out any scenes that depict kissing. At the end of the movie, Alfredo, who has since died, and Totò, who has become a famous movie director, there is a discovery. Can you guess what it is? The discovery becomes the movie's final scene. And it brought me to tears. If there is such a thing as poignancy without sentimentality, it's this film.  

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Monday Morning B&W Photo

Unfortunately, I'm not certain to whom I should cite the above photograph, but I post it anyway, as a valediction to Monday Mornings. People to see. Places to go.

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Video: Free Music for the Masses

A video taken in the Union Square subway station of musical performers in New York City.

 

A troupe performs in the public concourse at 14th Street Union Square station.

Location:Union Square, New York, NY

The Spirit of Capital: Philosophy Graduate Student Conference on Hegel and Marx at the New School for Social Research

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Call For Papers

Tenth Annual Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at the New School for Social Research   

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MOISHE POSTONE

APRIL 28TH -29TH, 2011

55 W 13th St., New York, New York

The New School University

The New School for Social Research

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the  whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the  Marxists understood Marx!!” wrote Lenin in 1915. In 1969, Althusser responded, “A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood Capital.” What are we to make of this challenge today? Are we now ready to understand Hegel through Marx, and Marx through Hegel?

It is high time for a reassessment of the core stakes of the Marx-Hegel debate. What would it mean to think the concepts of capital and spirit together? This conference is a place to explore the internal relations between Hegel and Marx’s philosophical projects. Some possible questions include: how does Hegel’s phenomenology, logic, philosophy of nature, history and right internally contain the elements that Marx will use to decipher the world of property, labor, commodities and capital? Is Capital a logical theory of forms or a theory of history? How does Marx negate and realize Hegel’s project? What is the role of labor in Hegel, and the role of spirit in Marx? Does the development of history show the unfolding of freedom or the unfolding of capital?  This conference echoes the early Frankfurt school tradition, with its project for a critique of the social forms of the present.

Themes
We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics and thinkers: 

Themes	Thinkers
The Philosophy of Right	I.I. Rubin
Substance and Subject in Capital	György Lukács
Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Grundrisse	Karl Korsch
Property, Alienation, and Class	Ernst Bloch
Form and Content in Hegel and Marx	Walter Benjamin
Concrete and Abstract Labor	Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Master and Slave	Theodore Adorno
Critique, Dialectic and Method	Herbert Marcuse
Time and History	CLR James
Freedom and Necessity	Raya Dunayevskaya
The Value-Form	Guy Debord
Critique of Labor	Alexander Kojeve
Revolution and Negation	Jean Hyppolite
Proletarian Self-Abolition	Frantz Fanon
Materialism and Idealism	Helmut Reichelt
Commodity, Money and Capital	Hans-Georg Backhaus
Capital and Spirit	Gillian Rose

Submissions
Papers ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words should be submitted in blind review format to s p i r i t o f c a p i t a l @ gmail.com
Include the following in the body of the email:
i. Author’s name
ii. Title of Paper
iii. Institutional affiliation
iv. Contact information (email, phone number, mailing address)
Please omit any self-identifying information within the body of the paper.

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Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Plain Language

Retold from The Republic of Plato

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image credit: "Plato and the Pure Forms"

       Once upon a time, everyone on earth lived in total darkness. In a cave.
       The only light people had was from a huge fire. The fire never stopped burning. The fire shone light from behind the people. But people were unable to turn around and see the source of the light because they were all chained to a wall. In between the fire and the people were cut-outs, of animals, trees, dogs, cars, etc., all the objects of the sensible world.
        The light from the flame cast the outline of the paper cut-outs onto the wall of the cave. The people chained to the wall were only able to perceive shadows of objects and not real objects. People only saw images. People were content. No one attempted to escape.
        But, one day a man became unchained. He at first did not know what to do with his new found freedom. But, he decided to turn around. He was surprised to see, when he turned around, that what he thought was real, was only shadows cast onto a wall from paper cut-outs.
         "That's lame," he said.
         He walked around the fire and the paper cut-outs and found an exit out of the cave. He climbed out. He stood on solid ground. He looked up and saw the brightness of the sun and shielded his eyes. The light was intense. After living in a cave all his life he had never experience the light of the sun. The intensity of the light was way too much for his unaccustomed eyes. But after a few hours above ground he began to adjust to the light and was able to see more clearly. He could discern leaves on trees and was able to distinguish goats from dogs. Everything was way more clear than down in the darkness of the cave.
        He became so overjoyed at what he was seeing, that he decided to tell all his friends in the cave so they could know the truth. He went back underground. Into the darkness.
        "Hey, guys. It's me. Look. You're all chained to a wall and what you see on the wall is not really real. Those are just shadows. You cannot see it, but behind you is a fire that casts shadows of paper objects onto the wall. None of that is real. I have been above ground and seen the sun and have seen real trees and real dogs. Not shadows. Allow me to release you from your chains and you can see for yourself."
        The people would not have any of this. They said amongst themselves, "He is crazy. Let us kill him." So they did. All at once they pounced on him and killed him because they could not accept the truth of his words.
         After they killed him they forgot about him. To this day no one speaks of the unchained man.

The End

If you would like to teach your students the Allegory of the Cave and you need additional resources, check out this lesson plan I created on Teachers Pay Teachers. You and your students will love it - and I gave it a lot of extra time and attention (which I hope you'll use and appreciate).

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Art Review: Hitler McDonald

Learn about Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City who does mashups of Ronald McDonald-cum-Adolf Hitler.

Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City, has showcased at the New York Art Book Expo his poster image of an amalgam between Hitler and Ronald McDonald. Strangely, the combination seems appropriate, don't you think?

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