Chakira

Some of us are always mulling over Heidegger’s section on tool being. Not slate.com. In today’s piece on “natural scrolling” they tell us the real difference between vorhanden and zuhanden.

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In a beautiful article in Reform Judaism, Emily Langowitz tells us about her “frum week.” A committed reform Jew, Emily took time to refine and better understand these commitments by practicing Orthodox Judaism for a week. There were a few surprising aspects of this article that I really enjoyed. The first was Langowitz’s framing of her justificatory project. The second was the importance of the music of prayer to her experience. Her emphasis on food and fashion interested me as well. And finally, her article gave me new insight into the positioning and marketing of Orthodoxy in the 21^st Century.

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Americans are suckers for our own decline. As this New Yorker piece reminds us, declinism as a rhetorical strategy is nothing new, although according to Adam Gopnik, only Spengler did it right. Whatever the case may be, we have got nothing on the British, who, as the LRB showcases, are now mourning the last time they mourned their decline. The NHS, the great cradle to grave upshot of the previous decline of the UK, is now under assault, the piece tells us, by shadowy corporate forces that threaten to make it more efficient in the guise of making a profit.

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What do we talk about when we talk about getting organized? We talk about hardware. The discourse of personal virtues, being fastidious or having it together, is often supplanted by a three word magic formula “get an iPhone.” If we miss an appointment, it’s because Outlook sucks, and we really should switch over to Gmail. Better yet, we were in a dead zone. Not because we are negligent.

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By now the story is well known. A mega-nonprofit conglomerate masquerading as a Yeshiva puts out a PR video about Rosh Hashanah which, while it has no content, features quite impressive feats of breakdancing. Predictably, the breakdancers are not recent returnees to the faith showcasing their talents, but a professional breakdancing team dressed in the black and white uniform of the particular sect they are advertising. This all seems utterly harmless, although we might need to add a term to the astroturfing lexicon to adequately describe this particular ejaculation of corporate free speech (and I welcome suggestions in the comments). Which all begs the question, 24 hours later, why am I still so upset about this stupid video?

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I am going to occasionally blog on the Zohar in conjunction with the Zohar Haburah I am running here in Boston. If you are interested in joining the group, feel free to reach out to me.  Text available here, pages 1:1a and 1:15a.

The Zohar first begins with the Hakdama and then begins again with Bereshit. How do we compare the initial themes of the two “beginnings” of the Zohar?

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Yaacov Dweck’s The Scandal of Kabbalah tells the story of Leon Modena’s Ari Nohem, an anti-Kabbalistic treatise written into MSS by the famous Venetian rabbi in 1639. A multifaceted work embracing the history of the book, the actual details of the anti-Kabbalistic treatise and its subsequent impact upon the Haskalah, The Scandal of Kabbalah may demand more than one post. In this iteration, I want to look at the methodological orientation of the book vis a vis the field of Kabbalah.

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I can sense the palpable disappointment of my readers who all waited for two days for a post on Heidegger, and will now be rewarded for their patience with a post on the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen. However, Gehlen’s concerns form an important bridge, connecting the Kantian subtext of Cassirer’s version of “What is Man?” with Heidegger’s version of the question. They are also unjustly neglected.

Gehlen begins Man with an introduction called “Man as a Special Biological Problem.” For Cassirer, there are philosophical and biological ways of asking “What is Man?”, and for Scheler there are religious, philosophical and biological ways of asking “What is Man?”. Gehlen admits of the philosophical and the biological. Unlike Cassirer, for whom the former will be the guiding “thread of Ariadne” for Gehlen, right up front, it’s going to be the latter. Still this is a book of philosophical anthropology. We need to ask, how does the relationship between philosophy and biology play itself out?

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How is man a problem for himself in Philosophical Anthropology? While all philosophical anthropologists are committed to the notion that man is (goshdarn it!) a problem for himself, we can detect a few models of the problem we are for ourselves. This is another way of parsing Kant’s 4^th question, “what is man?” What do we mean when we ask, “what is man?”

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The famous debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg has been ably dispatched in a recent dissertation by Joe Kroll, A Human End to History? Hans Blumenberg, Karl Loewith and Carl Schmitt on secularization and modernity.  Much documentary evidence has been published in Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg Briefwechsel 1971-1978: Und weitere Materialien. Without entering these thickets, there is a cryptological dialogue which occurs between Blumenberg and Schmitt that is worth shedding light on. It concerns the primordial boundaries of the earth and the sea, of law and philosophy.

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