(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “Hybris over What Is: On Aeschylus.”) Heraclitus (fl. 504–501 BCE), Pindar (c. 518–438), and Parmenides (fl. 475) were roughly contemporary with one another; and with Aeschylus (c. 525–455). Pindar is commonly considered to be a poet, Aeschylus a tragedian, and Heraclitus and Parmenides philosophers. But this is…
Author: polymorph
Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus
(N.B. This entry follows from the conclusion to the previous one, titled “Τhe Last God.”) hybris (“excess”) must be extinguished more than a fire (ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαῖήν) – Heraclitus, DK B43(⊛) “Prometheus,” προμηθεύς (pro-metheus) means “forethought” (from προ- [pro-, “fore-”] + μανθάνω [manthano, to “think”]). It is paramount to make clear the…
The Last God
It can be said that, in its fragility, the last in the sense of the last flash of something remains for us as a claim even after it passes. Such is its power. Entitled “The Last God” (»Der letze Gott«), the penultimate chapter of Heidegger’s posthumously-published Contributions to Philosophy opens with a reflection similar to…
On Difference
In the first place, difference presents itself in two ways: as difference in nature (a dolphin is different from a violin because their respective natures differ) and difference in degree or gradual difference (it is now warmer than it was earlier this morning). Yet difference can be also thought in terms of archetypes and their…
Other (Non-)Life(?)
Objects(*) are the product of multiple relations – or, rather, their crystalizations. They form at the intersection of relational nodes. Where things touch each other and get enmeshed, new objects appear. As Jeffrey Cohen writes, “medieval writers […] described thunderstones that drop with fire from the sky, rocks that emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of…
Anthropology as Heterology
It was Herder (1744–1803) who coined the term Volkskunde (pl. Völkerskunde), which may be translated as the “knowledge” of the “popular traditions” and “cultural practices” of a given “nation” or “people.” But it was not until 1839 and 1843 that the first learned ethnological societies were established in Paris and London, respectively. The Ethnological Society…
Picturing Schumann’s Ghost Variations in Abstract Terms
For Luigi Attademo We have recently written on Schumann’s Morning Songs, Op. 133, for piano. Like these, the Theme and Variations in E-flat major for piano WoO 24, also know as Gesitervariationen (Ghost, or Spirit, Variations, due to Schumann’s self-declared source of inspiration as it is mentioned in Clara Schumann’s diary of February 17, 1854),…
On Schumann’s Songs of Dawn
Jankélévitch famously wrote that “only music can express things which are infinitely ambiguous, as, unlike logic, music must not opt between things which are incompossible or contradictory: it can bring forth and develop, with the help of polyphony, several independent lines of discourse.”(⦼) As a matter of fact, poetry can do it, as well. Consider,…
Ulysses’s Siren
For Pere Ros Suppose a series of musical notes forming a melody (the black circles are the notes, the arrow indicates their succession): Suppose, though, that instead of hearing the notes sounding cleanly one after another, some of them were shaken by a gusty wind; as a result, such notes would “look” more or less…
On Leibniz
“Each singular substance expresses the whole universe in its own way, […] even if [somewhat] confusingly,” writes Leibniz in his Discourse on Metaphysics (§ 9). Let’s risk a gloss: There is no-one who has not received at least once, no matter how briefly, Athena’s or Eros’s or Ares’s visit (i.e. there is no-one who has…