Thursday, May 06, 2010

Journal 06.05.10

Question: Where is sexuality left in Christian friendship? Especially, homo-erotic friendship

The origin of law in the Roman world is necessarily bound up with notions of force and coercion, that is, with violence

Hegel on being at home: “…But for this reason the individual is not at home even in his immediate environment, because it does not appear as his own work. What he surrounds himself with here has not been brought about by himself; it has been taken from the supply of what was already available, produced by others, and indeed in a most mechanical and therefore formed way, and acquired by him only through a long chain of efforts and needs foreign to himself” Note: From this can follow naturally that Jews in the most general sense and modern men in abstract sense can never be at home. They were thrown into a world which they didn´t receive of their very own will but had yet to surrender to the contingency and attempt to transform the configuration of that world, whether they like it or not, into a temporary station where life and other activities, biological and cultural, take place. Of course in this sense “a world as it is” could never be a fact one may accept or not accept; there is a permanent strife in which criticism is the modern surrogate for building a word, the bridges are all psychological and thus the only possible engagement would be, to find the closest grave around.

Poetry and Prose as forms of political and social organization: Poetry has access to the whole, whereas prose is a form of abstract reasoning based on a distinction between means and ends.

Hegel: We have to follow not the path of self-enlightening doubt (Zweifel), but the path of despair (Verzweiflung). This does not demand that established truths should be suspended until they have been tried and tested. It is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized concept. Note: Are then we not supposed to be enlightened? An utterance as such couldn´t be adopted philosophically without much needed critical irony. This contradicts the whole of Hegel´s system, it un-allows the philosophical pedestrian to find a place to lay his head in the present and thus legitimate it.

On being antinomian: This is to flee from life and its law, to make life the enemy – “their love was to remain love and not become life”

“The rejection of rational law and ethical life by the Church was enshrined in the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The vow of poverty meant the denial of work and productive activity. As a result of this vow the Church accrued great riches because people who wished to live in penance bestowed their wealth on it. The vow of chastity demeaned the natural ethical life of the family and gave rise to an obsession with physicality and sexuality divorced from the meaning of natural ethical life. The vow of obedience amounted to the justification of acceptance of blind, external authority. It prevented the realization of the concept of freedom and reinforced the prevailing arbitrary dependencies”.

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