Being & Tim's Holiday Snaps: Day 1

I've finally got round to drawing some B&T for my one-a-day-project: this is a picture from Being & Tim's holiday in Greece...

Here is what Wikipedia says about Plato's Cave and what it means:

''Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners'' 

That is to say: it's not a real cave.

For those of you who are interested, I am still doing my one-a-day drawing project, but have moved it to another blog, cos Being & Tim were getting jealous. You can find it at www.rasdyer.blogspot.com, and I'll update it every couple of days (my new year's resolution said nothing about scanning everyday! But I will do my best)

Another pic from Being & Tim's holiday tomorrow,

becca xx 

Naked Dasein

'Even in the most indifferent and inoffensive everydayness the Being of Dasein can burst forth as a naked 'it is and it has to be'

Oooh matron.

xo

Being does not belong to man

Simone Weil says that 'being does not belong to man' on page 33 of Gravity & Grace, the most famous of her works. Wikipedia says:

'It is difficult to speak conclusively of Weil's theology, since it exists only in the form of scattered aphorisms in her notebooks, and in a handful of letters. Neither of these formats provides a very direct path to understanding or evaluating her beliefs<sup>' 


and I'm inclined to believe it, not because it's right but because I'm exhausted by a weekend of gigging and making nettle ale! 
Thanks to Nicole Holgate for the reference, her blog is here, and she does a cool zine entitled 'What Would Nietzsche Do?'
She would say that it's more about zombies than Nietzsche, but I think the important themes are all there: existential angst,
sceptical self-reflexivity, moustaches....

I've also been working on another blog, for my illustration work. It's not going to be half as fun as Being & Tim.

'Til Thursday,

becca xo</sup>

Well-Being

In 'How to bluff your way in Philosophy' Jim Hankinson describes the main characteristics of Eastern Philosophy in a section called 'How to Be a Mystic':

'1/ Invent a few meaningless paradoxes (such as 'The only true light is the darkness' or 'Each step forward is a step backwards').
2/. Have a line in pointless proverbs (like 'He who talks with the goldfish is lucky to receive an answer', or 'the taller the tree, the thinner the fruit').
3/ Profess a belief in at least one palpable metaphysical absurdity, such as that Everything is All One, or that Ordinary Reality is merely a Base Illusion in Comparison with the True Light of the Godhead. Remember to Talk in Capital Letters.
4/ Intimate in an obscure way that the Road to Enlightenment, though Long and Hard, is Ultimately Traversable, and hint that a good method of traversing it is by entering on a Close Physical Relationship with yourself.
5/ At all times wear a Benign Smile, for practical purposes indistinguishable from the Inane Grin' (1999:56)

I have nothing to add.

beccaxo

Alvin, Simon and Theodor W. Adorno

i only just realised how long it's been since i put up a post: sorry about that, it's partly cos i've been busy, partly because I've  been doing this cartoon in COLOUR which always takes ages...

The idea of this cartoon began with changing Alvin, Simon and Theodor (the chipmunks) into Alvin, Simon and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: but it ends up working better with neo-Marxist thinker Theodor W.Adorno, not only because he does look a little like a chipmunk, but also because you can change the words of the Chipmunk's classic Alvin's Harmonica to incorporate a reference to Adorno's co-author Max Horkheimer, AND a quotation from Adorno's Minima Moralia!:                 
                                                                   

  'Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before. Sociability itself is a participant in injustice, insofar as it pretends we can still talk with each other in a frozen world, and the flippant, chummy word contributes to the perpetuation of silence, insofar as the concessions to those being addressed debase the latter once more as speakers.' S. 5             

                                                        Statements like these often do just seem a bit opposed to common-sense, but i think his idea is actually pretty interesting, although my understanding of his work is not very deep. The  general idea seems to be that our language originated under different economic conditions, and the objects it referred to then, no longer exist under the economic conditions of capitalism. Most importantly, when we attempt to identify the 'free subject' described by our language, we cannot point to a real example of such a subject. Capitalism, as an economic totality, already structures our choices, so we cannot make a choice that is totally free. Either we work to pay the rent or we go and live in a squat and risk continual eviction, but we stand in relation to capitalism, not outside it.

The idea that we can't escape a legal or economic system but that we always stand in relation to it is a common one: what is interesting for Adorno is that this is a problem rooted in language. As such, we can't truthfully even describe an alternative: this is why Adorno sees the 'chummy word' as participating in injustice. Our language itself separates us from each other, because it does not really refer to the world we experience, or the person we are attempting to address.

So he would probably hate the chipmunks... oops.

beccaxo

Species Being