Brassier has a particular end in mind. This is the inexorable fact
of extinction, the polemical pivot of this book:
“[T]he earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billion years hence; all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate.”
For Brassier, these facts are of central philosophical import. In his view, because extinction is the inevitable fate of existence, in logical time it has already occurred. “The subject of philosophy is already dead,” Brassier writes, “and ... philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.”
Brassier’s basic claim is epistemological. In his understanding, humanity ultimately has no intrinsic value, and it is the duty of rational thought to embrace this fact. “[E]xistence is worthless,” he writes, “and nihilism is ... the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality which ... is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.” -- Daniel Miller on Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound (Palgrave, 2007), sample chapter available here
Madness (Wahnsinn) does not mean a sensing (Sinnen) that imagines (waehnt) the senseless (das Unsinnige). Plato distinguishes two kinds of madness: the first is the philosophical madness of love that remembers the being of sensible things as they are, the second is madness as a disease, which clings to the sensuous world of desires. Heidegger displaces this opposition by claiming that madness belongs to the sensuous world, and yet at the same time remains away from it.
This strategy, therefore, interprets madness as "neither, nor" in terms of the Platonist structure. Heidegger once again appeals to the old high German root of Wahnsinn. The word "wana" means "without." Hence, the mad one senses, and senses like no one else. The word "to sense" (Sinnan) originally means, "to travel," "to strive toward." The mad one is on the way to somewhere else.
Thus, Heidegger retains an aspect of Plato's understanding of madness as detached from immediate presence. Yet, unlike Plato, Heidegger does not circumvent the absence (being-away) at the heart of human existence in terms of the presence of forms. – Ferit Gueven, Madness and Death in Philosophy (2005)
Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.
Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live – that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster."
Even Socrates was tired of it. What does that evidence? What does it evince? Formerly one would have said (oh, it has been said, and loud enough, and especially by our pessimists): At least something of all this must be true! The consensus of the sages evidences the truth."
Shall we still talk like that today? May we? "At least something must be sick here," we retort. These wisest men of all ages -- they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? late? tottery? decadents? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion? -- Nietzsche, The Problem of Socrates
Detachment from things. Skimming through Eckhart, you pause at these words: gelazenheit, gelassenheit, abgeschiedenheit. What does it mean to let go? And why – having let go of these things – must one still be concerned with them at all, as Eckhart advises? How can there be a proper attitude toward things with which you have no cares?
Already you have mastered the art of losing, as E. Bishop advises. You’ve lost these things, now those. There will be more to come.
Places you will never live, you think, driving along West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, as the bus makes its way up the side of the Hudson. A man on a cellphone last evening, rushing to hail the bus as it sped along, lost his grip on his phone. It launched into the air like the baton in Kubrick’s “2001.” He delayed the phone’s arrival onto the sidewalk with an outstretched hand once, twice, three times, but with each swat the phone’s arc extended a bit higher – and farther away – from him. Finally, the parabola passed out of the range of his hand, and his phone went to ground. All this at night, observed by the bus’s passengers, seeing the dimly blue-neoned dance as the bus slowed down, and then – as the man fell to his knees, exasperated (crushed?) by the demise of his $350 instrument, now smashed in pieces along the ground – sped up again, leaving without its passenger. One wonders how this sounded to the person on the other end of the conversation.
Detachment from things, then. As you descend the bookstore’s escalator, an employee shouts out to another: “Things!” The other employee looks in his direction, where a board game is being held up for display. “It’s the game of Things!” the young man says, in disgust. “Boy, Milton Bradley is really getting original!”
You have nothing to proclaim, but are silent about much, dwindling and falling headlong from one hour to the next.
"Where does philosophy begin? It begins, I believe, in an experience of disappointment, that is both religious and political. That is to say, philosophy might be said to being with two problems: (i) religious disappointment provokes the problem of meaning, namely, what is the meaning of life in the absence of religious belief?; and (ii) political disappointment provokes the problem of justice, namely, 'what is justice' and how might justice become effective in a violently unjust world?" — Simon Critchley
The above detail is taken from Klimt's "Philosophie," destroyed in 1945, although a sketch is available for viewing at Die Neue Galerie, New York, through May 2008. Of this commissioned work it has been written:
"The turning point in his relationship to officialdom — as well as in his personal artistic development — came with a series of allegorical canvases, commissioned for the University of Vienna, depicting the faculties of philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence. When the first of these was initially exhibited in 1900, it provoked a scandal unlike any ever seen before in Vienna. The blatant nudity of the figures was one issue, but people were at least equally upset by the paintings’ unrelenting negativism.
"The three faculties were shown as essentially powerless to stave off death or to ameliorate humanity’s intrinsic ills."
"He who wishes to place himself in the beginning of a truly free philosophy must abandon even God. Here we say: who wishes to maintain, he will lose it; and who gives it up, he will find it. Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth of life who has once abandoned everything and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato compared to death." – Heidegger, quoting Schelling, in Lecture Course on Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
