Appendix E: The Theological Foundations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

The Theological Foundations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 

“Life is the union of union and nonunion.”

-Hegel, Early Theological Writings, p. 312.

 (∀x){Lx ⊃ [Ux ⊃ (Ux * ~Ux)]} 

One of the greatest philosophical treasures I have recently found is an introduction to Hegel’s early theological writings contained in a collection of essays titled, “On Christianity: Early Theological Writings,” (1907) by Friedrich Hegel, trans. by T. M. Knox with an Introduction by Richard Kroner, (pdf.). 

After being dismissed from the university at Kiel by the German Nazis in 1934, the Neo-Hegelian philosopher, Richard Kroner, escaped to America to become professor of philosophy at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary. Kroner’s introduction to Hegel’s early theological writings (original text pages 1-66) is a condensed overview of Hegel’s Christian theology. Kroner narrates the evolution of Hegel’s thoughts on religion from about 1788 to 1801, which ultimately appears in his most famous written work “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” in 1807. Kroner comments on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (pdf.) in his introduction to build a larger picture of Hegel’s goal, “to intellectualize Romanticism and to spiritualize Enlightenment (Hegel’s Early Theological Writings, here on as HET, original pagination 21).” 

Dr. Kroner recounts how Hegel was extremely impressed by the philosophical movements of his time including Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The German Romantic poet-philosophers Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling were school roommates with Hegel. Philosophers Kant, Rousseau, and the famous poet Goethe (who was a close friend of Schelling) are also found at the core of Hegel’s fully matured philosophical system.

In these early--and sometimes conceptually contradictory--theological essays Hegel works out the dialectical-philosophical language he needed to write the Phenomenology of Spirit. This appearance (phenomenology) of Geist (Spirit or Mind) is a history of the evolutionary development of human consciousness into higher self-consciousness and truth: that is to say, the process of the Logos becoming incarnate.

Yet even his love for these philosopher-poets did not prevent Hegel from critiquing Romanticism and the Enlightenment and even rejecting some parts, or whole worldviews. Hegel rejected Schelling’s conception of God-substance as the Absolute (Being as an undivided whole) with the one-liner response, “…in the Absolute, all cows are black….” Instead, Hegel formulated the Absolute, the whole of a unified reality, as God-Subject, i.e., immaterial Mind, or Spirit. 

Knox does not mention in his introduction one other similar case involving the theologian--and has always annoyed me--when Hegel rejected Kantian philosopher-theologian Schleiermacher and his doctrine of the connection humans have with the infinite as a “feeling of absolute dependence on the infinite.” Hegel gave the brutal response,  "If religion grounds itself in a person only on the basis of feeling, then . . . a dog would be the best Christian, for it carries this feeling more intensely within itself and lives principally satisfied by a bone." The same sentiment toward theologies of experience exists to this day.

 

Of course Hegel’s counter-argument is not fair to neither Schelling, nor Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher would never claim religious experience is “only on the basis of feeling.” Schleiermacher’s use of the term “feeling” does not mean mere affection, or “sensation,” which is “...the lowest stage in the development of the human spirit,” but rather “feeling, as immediate self-consciousness, is the last and highest stage in the same development.” Feeling is the synthesis of thought and will; it is the unity of our being. (see, Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative,”Robert Munro, Pub. Paisley, Alexander Grardner, 1903, p.200)(pdf.).

 

Schelling views the entire history of philosophy as a struggle between positive philosophy (historical philosophy) and negative philosophy (for Schelling ultimately meaning religious philosophy).  Schelling writes, “At the end of negative philosophy I have only possible [my emphasis] and not actual religion…It is with the transition to positive philosophy that we first enter the sphere of religion (Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy, Fichte to Hegel, Vol. 7, Part I, Doubleday, 1965, page 170).”

 

Schelling believed there should be an emphasis on a philosophy of nature to compensate for the tendency of thought systems to bypass actual existential being since purely idealist philosophies cannot ever logically deduce the world’s existence, or positive being from negative essences, or concepts. Schelling’s emphasis on philosophy of existence, of actuality continued with Left Hegelians philosophers such as Feuerbach (All theology is anthropology) and Marx (dialectical historical positivism). In 1831 Shelling filled Hegel’s chair of philosophy in Berlin and attempted in his lectures to correct what he believed was Hegel’s overemphasis on the negative philosophy of abstract possibility.

 

The Dialectical Development of Hegel’s Early Theology 

“To eliminate the Kantian element in Hegel's philosophy is like eliminating the Platonic element in Aristotle.”—Professor Knox.

Hegel disagreed with Kant in other areas of epistemology and ethics, but he still remained Kantian at heart through his entire life. The pre-Socratic philosopher of change, Heraclitus, and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason inspired Hegel’s dialectical method presented in the Phenomenology (citing HET,p. 4). However, in that same work (Paragraphs 596-671, or pp. 424-72) Hegel harshly and enthusiastically criticized Kant’s ethical system of Duty (deontological ethics) as only a particular stage of developing human self-consciousness. The reason for Hegel’s rejection of Kantian ethics of duty is that all positive historical aspects of religion is purged leaving behind a abstract moralistic idealism impossible to achieve in existence, “…consciousness has realized that its truth is a pretended truth (Phenomenology, para. 631).

 

Thesis: The "Life of Jesus" as a Kantian Teacher of Ethics

 

Hegel drew his conclusions about Kantian ethics partly by performing a thought experiment in an essay on the “Life of Jesus” that presents Jesus as a teacher, or “the schema of morality” within the categories of Kantian religious moral rationalism. This essay was not meant for publication, and is fragmentary; however, Hegel’s criticism is more clearly expressed in his later mature writings (HET, p. V). Hegel eventually rejected the hypothetical Kantian Christ as non-historical (negative) that eventually devolves into the same pharisaic legalism that Jesus originally tried to liberate his followers. Kant’s pure moral rationalism is negative and rejects all historical (positive) elements as merely accidental, or non-essential to religion (Ibid., p. 5).

 

Hegel was dissatisfied with Christianity in his era that reduced itself to a mass collection of statues, dogmatic doctrines, and superfluous creeds. While still heavily influence by Kantian moral rationalism at the age of twenty-five, Hegel wrote, “In The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (The first two parts written in 1795-96, and part III in about 1800) in which he traces the internal problems of Christian orthodoxy to the historical context it emerged. A strict monastic Judaism, and a brutal Roman Empire were the forces that shaped Christianity echoing through the ages:

 “While Jesus aimed at a purely moral religion and fought against superstition and positivity, he could not help generating a church by positive means. He was bound to connect respect for the holiness of moral law with respect for the holiness of his own person. Thus the seed of ecclesiastical authority and of the positivity of all religious forms and institutions was planted. This is the tragic origin of the Christian church (HET,p. 4).”

Antithesis: Hellenistic Humanism with Kantian Rational Ethics

Hegel idealistically viewed Greek folk religion as one of freedom, “imagination and enthusiasm” as opposed to a inhuman clerical bureaucracy of rules that is “the religion of Enlightenment dominated by reason (HET,p. 3).” Hegel believed religion should be about this world and centered about the Greek notion of beauty, freedom, wisdom, and artistic imagination. Hegel still held onto to Kant’s rational ethics of positive moral action (actualization). 

Then suddenly in 1796 after moving from Bern to Frankfort, Germany, Hegel became more influenced by the Romantic philosophers such as Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, and Holderlin and then published his views in the essay, “The Spirit of Christianity,” reversing his former position by reaffirming the need for a historical (positive) Christianity. Now as a mystic Hegel created a new synthesis of Greek humanism, and Kantian moral philosophy which itself has a deep kinship to Judaism:

“The soul of Greek religion is beauty; the reason of Kantian philosophy is morality. Hegel concluded that ultimate truth was moral beauty, and this truth he discovered in the Gospel. The moral principle of the Gospel is charity, or love, and love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty which combines the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason. This is the synthesis achieved in The Spirit of Christianity (HET,p. 25).”

 

Synthesis: Pantheism of Love

"What is a contradiction in the realm of the dead is not one in the realm of life." 

--Hegel, HET, p. 261. 

But once again truth is discovered to only be pretended truth. These three worldviews of Hellenism, Kantianism, and Judaism had an other-worldliness. Judaism and Kantianism were “monarchical theism” while Hellenism was polytheistic, pantheistic, combined with Stoicism. Hegel believed, “…Jesus teaches a pantheism of love which reconciles Greek pantheism with Judaic and Kantian theism (HET, p. 10).”

The internal contradiction of Hellenism and Kantianism are synthesized by Hegel with the Gospel of Jesus to create a ”Pantheism of Love,” (ibid., p. 10). The unifying Gospel of love overtakes atomizing alienated reflection. Christ represents now a non-rational ethics, but a more powerful unsystematic non-conceptual “ethics of Love.” Hegel believed that this newly synthesized pantheism of love reconciles the disunity of  “one-sided rationalism, one-sided emotionalism, or one-sided empiricism.” Even in Hegel’s philosophical development we see the same pattern repeatedly emerge beginning with an original organic unity (thesis), then disunity (antithesis) that moves on to temporary reconciliation (synthesis). 

Antithesis: The Pantheism of the Logos 

Unfortunately, love is not enough…to bridge the alienating chasm between life (existence) and thought (essence). The spirit of Christianity has historically continually fallen into the trap of objectifying itself into a dogmatic faith of doctrines and creeds instead of a living community of universal spiritual love. After about 1796 Hegel undergoes yet another paradigm shift that provides a more scientific (methodologically systematic) approach to philosophy that recognizes the dialectical patterns created by the interplay of logical oppositions in thought and actual history. With this new methodology Hegel still retains pre-Socratic Hellenistic influences in the form of Heraclitean cosmology where all things material and immaterial emerge out of conflict and change in accordance to a single Logos, or Reason. The Romantics were seemingly pushed out of the system, but they still heavily influenced Hegel’s thinking within this new synthesis that attempted to unify Romantic spirit with logical analysis.

 “…ultimate unification was to be brought about by a rational rather than a Romantic method. While the Romanticists were content with denying ultimate separation, indulging in pictorial language and paradoxes to give force to their negation….The original unity of all things is for him not the object of a mystical or poetical intuition but a truth discovered by logic (HET, p. 15).”

Yet, this ultimate conceptual unification still contains within it different stages of human mind, or consciousness (Enlightenment, Romanticism, Ethical, Religious) presented in Hegel’s later 1807 Magnum opus, “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” These same familiar internally conflicting frame of minds, or shapes of consciousness are reconstructed by phenomenological description as “self-certain Spirit (para. 166),” “unhappy consciousness (para. 197),” “self-alienated Spirit (para. 487),” and “the beautiful soul (para. 632).” These multiple states of consciousness can be found at anytime among persons in many cultures today, and maybe even especially today. According to Hegel the Logos (Reason) can guide consciousness down the road of historical experience to a conceptual unification of Existence and Essence, the Whole and the Parts, of the Infinite and the Finite. 

Reading and rereading Dr. Richard Kroner’s introduction with these theological texts not only provide endless insights into Hegel’s own thought, but also give insight into other philosophers (Marx and Kierkegaard) who imitated and critiqued Hegelian Absolute Idealism.

Appendix D: The Struggle Against Solipsism

 The Struggle Against Solipsism

”Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”—James P. Carse, “Finite and Infinite Games,” p. 10.

The critique of Positivistic ideology is complex and technical, but it can be introduced as a relatively clearer critique of Solipsism. Solipsism can be a “presentation concept” to frame this discussion for critiquing science and technology. One cannot logically and consistently accept—or reject for that matter-- Positivism as the paradigm of scientific objectivity, and then reject a critique of Positivism as too abstract because these abstractions are already contained in Positivism’s methodology.

The critique of solipsism was one of Wittgenstein’s goals in writing the Tractatus by showing the limits of language just as Kant demonstrated the limits of Reason in The Critique of Pure Reason. For Wittgenstein language is only meaningful when connected to the world of empirical facts, just as for Kant we can only know the world of experience through the categorical lens of space and time. Both philosophers critiqued solipsism as a symptom of overly reductionist philosophies.

“The solipsist’s predicament is that, when he denies the existence of everything except himself and the world of his own experiences, he is unable to point to what it is that, according to him, does not exist, because it lies outside his world…he is like a man who carefully constructs a clock, and then attaches the dial to the hour hand so that they both go round together. There is no contrast with anything outside his world…( Ludwig Wittgenstein by David Pears, (Penguin),(1970), p.74).” 

Wittgenstein in showing the limits of factual discourse faced the same problem except he cannot say whether a named object exists or not exist because their names are only names-- the objects are the meaning of a name. So he faces the same boundary as the solipsist: he is unable to name objects that do not exist.

“…only certain things exist, but that they exist is something that cannot be said. It can only be shown, and the solipsist’s mistake is to express it in a factual proposition…. [The Subject, or observer] is only a metaphysical subject, which is a kind of focal vanishing point behind the mirror and what the mirror reflects. So the only thing that he [Wittgenstein] can legitimately say is that what is reflected in the mirror is reflected in the mirror…but this is…only a tautology. It means only that whatever objects exist exist. So when solipsism is worked out, it becomes clear that there is no difference between it and realism (Ibid., p. 74)." 

 

1. The world is all that is the case.—Wittgenstein (Tractatus)(pdf.)

 (∀x)Wx

“For all x, x is the world.” I think this notation captures Wittgenstein’s meaning, but this proposition could be stated in another way just as it could be stated in ordinary language. For example proposition “1” could be symbolized as (x)(Wx ⊃ Cx).  However, the actual case could also be the “world,” so that the expression could be propositionally stated as the following:

 (x∀)[(Wx ⊃ Cx)] ⊃ (x∀)[(Cx ⊃ Wx)]

“If the world is all that is the case, then what is the case is the world.”

But is the predicate nominal  “W =  is the world,” just another object, or is it a constructed unity of relations?  In other words, the capital letter “W” (the predicate, or property constant used in Predicate Logic) is being used to denote both relational and non-relational properties. “All that is the case” include relations. Wittgenstein said, "Situations can be described but not given names." (3.144). Therefore, since a relation cannot be named, it cannot be an object. There are other propositions in the Tractatus that builds states of affairs from the concepts of Objects, states of affairs, and facts (2.01-2.0141), see Wittgenstein On Objects. However, he must have other propositions about states of affairs and facts because the one proposition “The world is all that is the case,” is inadequate in itself.

“...the conjunction (conjunctio) of a manifold in intuition [the many kinds of sense experiences] never can be given us by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of representation [of the self].”—Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 94)(pdf.).

How would the logical expression be written to imply that “the world” is a constructed unity of relations? The logician would say that the expression “for all x,” or (x∀) means whatever it can be expanded or quantified to—a very long conjunction of “ands”, (Wa and Wb) and (Wc and Wd) and (We and Wf), and so on. 

This task would only be possible if 1.) There were a finite number of entities in the real universe. 2.) We had a name for every entity in the real universe. However, the real world has a non-finite number of entities so such as long conjunctions of “ands” would be impossible to complete.

Take for example the proposition “Every Even Number is Divisible by 2.” Writing out the conjunction would be an endless chain of “ands” (symbolized with * asterisk), as in the proposition, [(N1 * N2 * N3….) * (E0 * E2 * E4….)]. The universal quantifier (∀x) “for all x” is necessarily exclusive so that we can only symbolize the even number proposition as the following: 

(∀x)[(Nx * Ex) ⊃ Dx] 

"Every even number is divisible by two.”

Sometimes symbolic logic is so minimalist, and so simple that it is difficult to comprehend. A problem of logical symbolization translates into metaphysics as the problem of solipsism. The symbols of logic can only operate in a finite world of entities; those entities that we can name, and yet this is an operationally impossible task due to computational explosion. What is the name of that which we cannot name? "Noumenon” from ancient Greek νοούμενoν means "something that is thought," or "the object of an act of thought." The shorthand of language and logic excludes much of what we call the world due to reductionist tendencies of symbolic systems. Kant names this existential residuum the thing-in-itself, or Noumenon. Kant is using the term noumenon to mean that the thing-in-itself cannot be known in principle, and not as an object yet undiscovered. Solipsism insists that only one’s own experiences are real, and the appearances, or phenomena represent the whole of the reality, i.e., of what is the case. 

"5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.

5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world--not a part of it (Tractatus)."

This constellation of sixty five essays have at some point or another touched on many of the philosophical issues discussed by Chomsky in the newly posted video below. 

I found another very interesting new video dialogue between Dr. Veveake, Dr. James Carse, at the Stoa hosted by Peter Limberg. I am reading Dr. Carse's book "Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility,"(1986) and must say it is a very, very good example of dialectical reasoning joined with phenomenological description. I would place myself on the infinite game player team!

Noam Chomsky: Science, Philosophy, Morality, & Anarchism (Interview)

Playing the Infinite Game During the Meaning Crisis w/ James Carse and John Vervaeke

Appendix C: An Existentialist Interpretation of the Last Scene of Fellini’s Film, “La Dolce Vita.”

An Existentialist Interpretation of the Last Scene of
Fellini’s Film, “La Dolce Vita,” (“The Sweet Life”)(1960)

“It’s a monster! It’s been dead for three days!”—Partygoers shout after discovering a giant bloated stingray fish on a beach.

The dead stingray represents spiritual death, nihilism, alienation, and the state of falleness of a particular state of human consciousness. There are other terms of this mode of human existence the Existentialist philosophers use to describe this shape of consciousness such as the “they,” or “Das Man,” (The ‘averageman’) and as “inauthentic existence.” All these words attempt to name a form of personal consciousness that is not “owned” by itself, but lacking self-responsibility while self-deceptively seeking refuge from the anxious uncertainty characteristic of human freedom in its struggle for complete self-actualization. All of these phenomenological concepts are very abstract and material examples, which this film provides, are very helpful for giving them intelligible content. “Phenomenology” is the science of appearances, or φαινόμενον, the Greek term for “phenomenon” meaning to bring to light, make to appear, to show, combined with λόγος, ”logos” of which one of its meanings is study “of the subject,” as in “anthrop-ology.”

I have written about Heidegger’s philosophy before in a more formal way in the essay, “Dasein Analytic.” Writing about authentic and unauthentic Being requires a different kind of thinking that is richly expressive, which can put living flesh back onto these abstract reductionist concepts that attempt to illuminate the essential structures of human existence. Fellini’s film makes this kind of analysis much easier, fun, and even more relevant.

The film’s main character, Marcello Rubini, is a writer for Italian gossip magazines during the 1960s and is gradually pulled into, but also attracted to, the “sweet life” (“dolce vita”) of wealthy high society circles in Rome. This being one of Fellini’s most famous films, La Dolce Vita, is divided into seven episodes each tracing Marcello’s desperate effort to escape himself ending in the last scene on an Italian beach where he is on the verge of having insight into his own existence. Marcello represents a necessary and essential existential stage of human ‘mind,’ or ‘spirit’ (the German term ‘Geist’ has both meanings) that suffers from the anxiety of human existence. In an effort to escape, he embraces pleasure as an end in itself. Hegel quotes Goethe’s play “Faust” to describe this individualistic hedonistic consciousness aimed at fulfillment of desire as its only purpose in the Phenomenology of Spirit (paragraph 360):

“Instead of the seemingly heavenly spirit of the universality of knowing and doing in which the feeling and the gratification of singular individuality fall silent, the spirit of the earth has entered into it, a spirit to whom the only being which counts as the true actuality is that of the actuality of singular consciousness.

It despises intellect and science 

Man’s highest gifts – 

It has given itself over to the devil, 

And must perish”

A stingray is sometimes called a devil fish. For Heidegger, the character of Marcello would epitomize the average man, or the public “they” of all other human beings. In, Being and Time (1927)(pdf.), Heidegger wrote, “The ‘they’ has its own ways in which to be. That tendency… is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the ‘they’ (Being and Time, p.164).” Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of consciousness characterized this hedonistic mind—the spirit of the earth--as the self that allows the average-everydayness of an anonymous public “they” to prescribe “…one's state-of-mind, and determines what and how one 'sees' (Ibid., p. 213).” The concept of “seeing” plays an essential part of the person given over to endless hedonistic search for pleasure in the forms of spectacle, and novelty to achieve some sense of a substantial life; a world in which the subject (person) takes for granted they belong and are freely a part of that world.

Curiosity, Looking, and Seeing of the “They”

 “Even at an early date (and in Greek philosophy this was no accident) cognition was conceived in terms of the 'desire to see’.”--(Being and Time, p. 214)

Heidegger uses other words for special kinds of sight or seeing using his clever etymological kinship studies such as 'Umsicht' meaning “circumspection” for example (Ibid., p.159, Footnote 3). Sight (‘Sicht’) is the ability to see, or vision. On the other hand, seeing (‘Sehen’) is the ability to comprehend, recognize, and understand what is seen. In the English language, sight without seeing can mean, “looking” as when one says, “I am looking for the beacon, but do not see it!” or “I saw him, but did not recognize my old friend.”

These distinctions are important for understanding the particular way that the hedonistic self continually seeks seeing, but without comprehension. This particular “I” consciousness relates itself to the world in a mode of Being called “curiosity.” Heidegger describes this comportment of inauthentic human existence:

“The basic state of sight shows itself in a peculiar tendency-of-Being which belongs to everydayness-the tendency towards 'seeing'. We designate this tendency by the term "curiosity" [Neugier], which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but expresses the tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception (Ibid., p. 214).”

Historically, science is understood as having its genesis in the desire to see, but within inauthentic Being consciousness distracts itself from the issues of its own existential meaning. Seeing is a release from anxiety for inauthentic Being, but it fails to have understanding and comprehension for the person is only seeking sensation, or merely engaged in voyeurism. Voyeurism is one way consciousness abandons the world by superficially embracing the world.

“When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen (that is, to come into a Being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world (Ibid., p. 216).”

This kind of seeing is only one form of an idolatry of perception; another being natural-scientific reductionist empiricism in which perception is assumed to be immaculate, or received as purely objective without acknowledging the shaping influence the grasp of consciousness has on our experience. This school of empiricism then attempts to use its credentials as science to become a philosophy of life leading to the violation of human values with disastrous consequences.

One film reviewer summed up the character of Marcello as "detached." I used the term "alienation" to describe him, but Marcello is too detached to be alienated. All of the characters in the movie are ghosts, including two murdered children, in the sense they have an exterior appearance mirroring an internal struggle for spiritual meaning, for a substantial life, for a happy life.

In this mode of Being existence is “ambiguous” making it “…impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not (Ibid., p. 217)." Ambiguity is the inability of the self to distinguish between the authentic and unauthentic, between the substantial and unsubstantial in one’s own life, Others, and the world. Ambiguity is ignorance that signifies modal confusion. Like the dead devil fish monster on the beach, Marcello can look, but he cannot see.

Chatter and Idle talk

Heidegger describes as inauthentic the hedonistic individual consciousness oriented toward pleasure, superficial seeing; insincere averageness lacking depth; and endless curiosity that divides itself into infinite individual moments in which the fractured self loses its identity. These attributes are named “existentials,” and refer exclusively to the essential structures of human existence, and not to objects. Heidegger adds yet another existential,” named, “chatter” as a particular degenerated form of human discourse that has no understanding, and is just “Idle talk” based on conventional uncritical opinions functioning as yet another escape mechanism to avoid thinking, risk, and responsibility. Chatter filibusters any real commitment to a meaningful life such as this gossip columnist’s endlessly journey skipping from disconnected media event to media event:

“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own. … Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer…idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back (Ibid., p. 213)."

The Second, “Second Coming”

"The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own (idios kosmos)." "Hearing they do not understand, like the deaf. Of them does the saying bear witness: 'present, they are absent.’ “--Heraclitus

For the Greek word “idios,” the term “idiot” is formed to mean a private “individual,” and “kosmos” meaning “cosmos” or “world.”

Marcello and his party crowd stumble out of a beach house after enduring a boring night-long half-hearted orgy—I just hate those! They spill out into the beach parking lot and hear men calling out in surprise as they pull a giant string ray fish onto the shore. One fisherman suggested to the exhausted orgy partiers the fish could be sold for a large profit. This last scene’s “Second Coming” of the Devil Fish is as sarcastic as the first scene’s return of Jesus as archaic symbolism.

At first, the party mistake the stingray dragged up in the fishermen’s net as being alive, but the fishermen knew it had been dead for three days. Dead for three days: Lent fasting is during the six weeks before Easter, after the Carnival orgy. This moment carries for Marcello only the possibility of insight into authentic existence: an Either/Or moment of existential decision.

Marcello displays utter disgust and contempt for the alien creature which in turn encourages the others to mock the rotting inhuman corpse with its eyes wide open staring at the crowd; without any empathy, a smirking Marcello takes great pleasure speaking for the crowd declaring, “And it insists on looking.” Marcello is smirking at himself while summing up his own spiritually dead meaningless life.

The hedonistic nihilist mode of Being, “…experiences the double meaning implicit in what it did, viz. when it took hold of life and possessed it; but in doing so it really laid hold of death.”--Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph, 363.

The hung-over and exhausted Marcello wanders to the side of the crowd, and as he sits down on the beach, he hears a voice calling; a voice in the distance across an estuary where a river divides the beach and pours out into the open ocean. But Marcello is unable to hear the young girl, or understand what she is trying to say to him as the ocean waves drown out her voice.

For Marcello the “…pleasure enjoyed has indeed the positive significance that self-consciousness has become objective to itself, but equally it has the negative one of having reduced itself to a moment…its experience is of a contradiction in which the attained reality of its individuality sees itself destroyed by the negative essence confronting it, which is devoid of reality and content, and which yet is the power which destroys it…the poorest form of self-realizing Spirit….(Ibid., para: 363).”

Marcello is kneeling on the beach facing the angelic young girl as she calls out to him. He does not recognize her as the young waitress named Paola he encountered in a seaside restaurant days earlier. Marcello was working on a book while Paola hummed along with the jukebox. Marcello told Paola she reminded him of an angel in an Umbrian painting. Painter Raphael is the most famous painter of the High Renaissance Umbrian School of Art. “Paola” (Pow-la) is the Italian and Spanish feminine form of the name “Paul” which in this context has a religious meaning pointing to the appearance of Christ symbolizing the Substantial Life.

Scientific and unscientific symbolism shares a common ground in a wonderful synthesis of thought and existence, of Being and consciousness. The two different elements of Language that bears the power of logic, and Mythic-Symbols are unified by metaphor (Language and Myth, Ernst Cassirer, 1948). However, for Marcello all symbolism has lost meaning having been reduced to curious isolated images, and odd trinkets unable to point beyond themselves to truth: without truth, Marcello has no possibility of freedom. This is not a tautology. A person is not truly free if rational decisions of choice cannot be made by independent knowledge. Marcello’s consciousness makes it impossible for him to achieve any Great Awakening.

Marcello suffers forgetfulness, of a sense of loss, and the sense of having a debt outstanding. He is on the spiritually dead side of the mythological river of λήθη (Lethe) meaning “forgetfulness,” or “oblivion.” The souls entering the mythic Underworld of Hades drank from the river Lathe to forget they were dead. The letter ἀ is a negative prefix, or alpha privative. The Greek word for "Truth" is ἀληθείᾳ (a-lethea) that means the negation of forgetting, or “remembering.”

According to Johannine Christology the Logos has a face. Marcello is unable to recognize a substantial life even as it is disclosed to him as the face of the Other.

Parody only reinforces the Holy. This film was understandably criticized by the Vatican, and unfortunately banned in many states for parodying the second coming of Jesus; but below the surface of cultural symbolic imagery the film is actually very religious in its attempt to reach for a spiritual dimension in a negative way; however, it may not have been intended by the film makers. The first words for religion must be words against religion the Christian Theologian, Paul Tillich, counseled religious thinkers.

Appendix B 

B1

Husserlian Phenomenology: The Possibility of the Science of Essences

For an in-depth and technical explanation of Edumond’s Husserl’s phenomenological methodology, see Dr. Mark Thorsby’s lectures. Thorsby goes through Husserl's introduction to phenomenology in "Ideas" (pdf) section by section. In "Ideas " (section, 19, or pdf., p. 29) Husserl gives a powerful critique of naturalistic empirical positivistic methodology and its assumptions (Naturalistic Misinterpretations video @ 11 min. 43). He presents a good summary to the different types of phenomenologies. 

I have attended course lectures by Phenomenologist, Dr. Jitendra Mohanty, on Husserl’s critique of psychologism and the epistemological problems of naturalistic scientific empiricism. Dr. Thorsby gives an excellent lecture on this fundamental issue underlying all cognitive science, logic, and mathematics (Part II). Also, he teaches a complete symbolic logic course in another series of free videos on his channel. 

Phenomenology is the most radical form of empiricism for it describes the living stream of experience in meaning-reality; however, no pure phenomenological description is possible.

Mark Thorsby: Part I on Phenomenology: Types of phenomenology.
The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology.

1. Transcendental Constitutive Phenomenology: studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness.

2. Naturalistic Constitutive Phenomenology: how consciousness takes in the world of nature.

3. Existential Phenomenology: studies concrete human existence.

4. Generative Historicist Phenomenology: studies how meaning is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.

5. Genetic Phenomenology: studies the genesis of meanings of things.

6. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: studies interpretive structures of experience.

7. Realistic Phenomenology: studies the structure of consciousness, assuming a real world.

Appendix B2

Don’t forget about the Good Professor, Dr. John Vervaeke! I watch all of his videos. His monthly Question and Answer session for April, 17, 2020 is particularly good because it succinctly contains much of the content of his lectures and discussions during the last few months.

Each video lecture gets clearer and more concise on the themes of idolatrous objectification, self -deception, consciousness, paradigm entropy, the Logos, phenomenological existentialism, Kairos, Wisdom, dialectical meaning epistemology, Being Modes, and Mythic-Poetic thinking. 

I go crazy with excitement whenever he mentions Paul Tillich because his systematic theology unifies all those philosophical methodologies that we have been studying. Dr. Vervaeke incorporates the methodologies of Dialectics (Heteronomy vs. Autonomy), Critical Science (Kantian Criticism), and phenomenology (Heidegger, Tillich) in his scientific studies that require clear expression and terms. The professor's working vocabulary reminds me of the careful use of language by Husserl in his 1913 book introducing phenomenology, Ideas (pdf).

Appendix B3

Dr. Cornel West On Being A Revolutionary Christian 
April 23, 2020

Appendix B4

The Philosopher’s Stone

Dr. John Vervaeke discusses Carl Jung with cognitive scientists and practicing psychotherapist Anderson Todd who also teaches courses at the University of Toronto.

Speaking of synchronicity….

Todd demonstrates the use of all three methodologies of dialectical reasoning, critical philosophy, and phenomenology while discussing Jung and other philosophers. In addition, he integrates historical empirical research of past proto-cognitive science and classic philosophy. In other words, Anderson Todd is way ahead working on rich philosophical grounds.

I first encountered this concept of synchronicity in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment as ‘coincidence,’ and never seriously researched the concept further. Todd has an insightful and plausible interpretation of synchronicity. Synchronicity could also be understood as an experience of paradigmatic induction: the formation, or re-enforcing, or a weakening re-interpretation (thus inducted) of an ontological paradigm. Reason always demands coherence and completeness. A ‘coincidence’ is remembered and highly selective, but not meaningless. Coincidence can be a metaphor for transcendence. Is this a paradigmatic circularity any rational person can escape?

Also, I wondered why Isaac Newton spent many years experimenting with alchemy: he was not a gold speculator, but searching for something more valuable—the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. Rarely, is this side of Newton discussed. The alchemist is experimentally applying the categories of reason (Spirit) to matter, and attempting the reverse.

I am still holding on to the concept of telos, as “ethical telos,” or the “telos for the divine double,” seeking relevance realization, and transformative experience, which is compatible with historical telos, but not the Cold War trope of deterministic historical teleology.  

Appendix B5

The Book People

That ending scene from Fahrenheit 451 is so frightening, and so beautiful.

Eventually, I will link up each appendix to a specific topic in this strange collection of essays. And I wrote them: you can see all the spelling errors as evidence!

Contemporary books on phenomenology are expensive, and so most of my studies focus on primary sources, free online libraries, and my own small book collection. I have found YouTube’s online lecture series freely contributed by scholars, universities (St. John’s College Nottingham, NYC Union Theological Seminary, Goethe-Institute), and philosophers to be very good quality.

There are online lectures on Husserl, and Heidegger given by some of the scholar mentioned already in the other appendixes: Dr. John Veraeke, Dr. Gregory B. Sadler (I finally made it to Lordship and Bondage in Phenomenology of Spirit), Dr. Mark Thorsby (also goes to primary texts of Husserl and Heidegger with expert commentary), and Dr. Johannes A. Niederhauser.

Since contemporary books on Heidegger are so expensive, and I don’t read the German language, my knowledge of the later Heidegger is relatively weak. Dr. Johannes A. Niederhauser insightfully speaks in the language of the later Heidegger and is particularly helpful explaining his further philosophical development. Heidegger’s complete writings are massive in volume.

Lecturer Eric Sean Nelson, formerly at University of Massachusetts Lowell before locating to China, gives a lecture on the later Heidegger and his studies of non-Western religions. Paul Tillich also was doing the same type of exploration of other religions during the 1950s meeting with Daisetz Suzuki and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu to discuss Japanese Buddhism in New York and Kyoto, Japan at various times (Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, p. 254)(pdf).

The later Heidegger thought philosophy should be replaced by discourse. The Ancient Greeks had no word for language, but instead used the term "διάλογ-ος “ meaning “dialogue,” “conversation,” “debate,” or “argument.”

Philosopher Hannah Arendt was alive when phenomenology became a philosophical school of thought, and commented that it was “a time when talking became alive.” I think I know what she meant. 

This lecture by Eric S. Nelson ends at 54 minutes, but the question answer period is excellent also.

Husserl and Heidegger: Phenomenology, Eurocentrism, and Buddhism

Appendix B6

The Swimmer (1968)

 (Full movie)

"The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Chap. 5

The moral of the film is complete self-deception destroys the concept of Truth itself.

This very literary story was first written by John Cheever as a short story appearing in the The New Yorker magazine in 1964.

“The Swimmer” is about self-deception in American society during the heyday of capitalist growth and the extreme optimism that characterized the American mind. This frame of mind, or the shape of consciousness, in this era of suburban expansion and post-War II domination of the world economy was the Neo-liberal free market ideology beginning to emerge as unquestioned conventional knowledge.

We can see today’s corporate culture, which I have experienced, as motivational positive thinking pop psychology to manipulate people into conformity and to enforce ideological harmony masked by a cheerful fake veneer. This unrealistic optimism is strongly pointed out in the film. However, this consciousness is complete self-deception and delusion. Corporate positive psychology instills a false enthusiasm and happy conformity that denies truth itself not unlike Chinese Maoist revolutionary joyful extremists. Notice the excessive smiling of the characters which we see in North Korea. Excessive smiling has even become a syndrome for some Japanese businessmen. Face crimes are serious in authoritarian environments. Ned Merrill, the movie’s protagonist, is a wealthy, middle-aged advertising man trying to “swim” to his home in suburban Connecticut by skipping to his wealthy neighbors’ swimming pools along the way while ignoring the truth exposing his delusions and unconscious lies with his socialite friends, and ultimately with the film viewers. Ned lives a life of complete contradiction. Listen carefully to the dialogue as the truth will sometimes slip out. 

The dead in the Underworld would drink from the mythological river Lethe in order to forget they were dead.

In ancient Greek, λήθη (Lethe) means “forgetfulness,” or “oblivion.” Those that drank from the river Lethe would become oblivious to their true state of Being. The letter ἀ is a negative prefix, or alpha privative. The Greek word for "Truth" is ἀληθείᾳ (alethea) meaning the negation of forgetting, or knowledge is remembrance (early Plato). 

Most people have heard of Hegel’s famous “Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis” dialectical tirade of thought and historical change, but what is often not mentioned is that the suffering of self-delusion, or illusion of consciousness struggling with itself. This agony and spiritual internal violence is a central concept of Hegel’s historical account of the evolution of consciousness in time. Because of these internal contradictions Ned is unconsciously forced to seek unity in his fragmented life by swimming in each of his neighbor’s pools until reaching home. His journey isn’t a river as he images for rivers are a unified whole. The swimming pool is the human conception of nature’s Walden pond except that 99.99 percent of impurities are filtered away. Self-deception is easy to embrace because of our desires, but a difficult state of mind to escape. Both Ned, and the film viewers will reach what is known in Hegel’s thought as emerging self-consciousness at the end of Ned’s journey of untruth to truth.

Ned first appears in the film walking alone in a forest nearly naked, only wearing a bathing suit. Is he Adam exiting the Garden alone as post-lapsarian man?  Or is Ned the free Rousseauan “state of nature” good human being that transforms into an impostor by life’s shaping internal and external forces? This analysis could be developed further.

This is not a true story, but as myth it is the truest story.

I chose “The Swimmer” for review because of the current pandemic, but also this film as been interpreted by some as a critique of “postmodernism” which it clearly is not, but rather about the individualist social paradigm in American capitalist society.  Some of the postmodern interpretations make many of the same conceptual errors and fallacies identified in my last polemical essay titled, “The Ayn Randian Propagandistic Trope Concerning Postmodernism.”

APPENDIX
A

Appendix A1

I discovered a wonderful new philosopher, Johannes Achill Niederhauser PhD, appearing from the North through the lectures of Dr. John Vervaeke. Both philosophers deliver very high quality talks in their fields of study and interest.

Also, Dr. Vervaeke will soon have a video series on Socrates.

Notice that Dr. Niederhauser reads Heraclitus out loud in the original Greek! My goodness! Johannes has many more videos on his channel "Classical Philosophy" that are incredibly insightful.  

λύω 

I loosen, break, release, undo, resolve, atone for.

λυθήσεται

"She shall be released!"

Paradigm for the Greek verb λύω 

Cronos: Χρόνος

Appendix A2

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Toronto and Princeton University, where he is a visiting lecturer in African American studies. And Hedges has taught college credit courses for several years in New Jersey prisons. (Wikipedia: Chris Hedges)

In the spirit of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rev. Chris Hedges gave the following sermon in Victoria BC on January 20, 2019.

Appendix A3

Paul Tillich could be viewed as representing the religious wing of the Frankfurt School of Critical Research. Tillich was never an official member of the Frankfurt School, however, he knew Max Horkheimer as both a fellow professor at the University of Frankfurt, and the director of the Frankfurt School of Critical Research. Tillich once dedicated the essay "Participation and Knowledge: Problems of an Ontology of Cognition” to Max Horkheimer's sixtieth birthday in 1955.

Also, Professor Tillich knew the young Theodor Adorno as his student while acting as adviser for his habilitation (a written thesis), which the University of Frankfurt accepted. The approved habilitation gave Adorno permission to lecture. Eventually, all three scholars had to immigrate to the US as German exiles during the 1930’s as the Nazis took power.

Paul Tillich, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer wrote about the same concerns of the modern age using the same methodologies of dialectical reasoning, critical theory, and phenomenology. All foresaw the dangers of instrumental rationality, systems of domination, existential alienation, repressive reified social concepts, objectification of human beings, and nihilism. Tillich formulated and applied metalogic (a reconfiguration of dialectical analysis, critique, and phenomenology) as his methodology to examine these modern afflictions in both the religious realm (heteronomy), and secular culture (autonomy). Adorno demanded everyone keep their feet on the ground of existence, and not fly off into pure metaphysical speculation. Horkheimer was more of a mediator between the two other philosophers.

As a religious socialist, Tillich worked to keep Christianity relevant to persons in modern industrial society by reinterpreting its symbols of meaning, and categories. For Tillich culture is directed to “conditioned forms,” while religion is directedness to “Unconditional meaning,”(Schelling).

Tillich writes,"...culture is a form of expression of religion, and religion is the substance of culture" (Tillich, What is Religion?, p. 73)(pdf). On the other hand, “....culture in substance is religious, even though it is not so by intention, (ibid.,p. 97).

In both cases the religious and cultural unintentionally display common essential elements that seek fulfillment in a complete unity of meaning within the “living stream of meaning reality.”

"...every religious act is... a cultural act; it is directed toward the totality of meaning. But it is not by intention cultural; for it does not have in mind the totality of meaning…. In the cultural act, therefore, the religious is substantial; in the religious act the cultural is formal”(ibid.,p. 59).

For more about the philosophical relationship between Horkheimer, Tillich, and Adorno see the very short summary review of the book, Prophetic Interruptions: Critical Theory, Emancipation, and Religion in Paul Tillich, Theodor Adono, and Max Horkheimer (1929-1944), Atlanta, GA: Mercer University Press, November 2017.

I studied some of the Youtube video lectures about Paul Tillich, and selected this one by Russell Re Manning as one of the best overviews. Part I of II.

Appendix A4

I want to provide some background for the two videos on the Frankfurt School. 

By the way, the Frankfurt School is often referred to as "Culture Marxism," a popular old Cold War trope. And, it is true that the Frankfurt School is about Marxism for sure, but what they do not tell you is the Frankfurt School is also about Christian theology--they lied to us again, but we're used to it. Marxism has had more impact on Western Christian theology, than on Western economic theory--and it has only been 170 years. After reading something written by Paul Tillich, I feel...free.

Some Frankfurt School members fled fascist Germany, and while in exile attempted to understand how fascism emerged out of a Capitalist society by researching German society.

1.) The Frankfurt School scholars extended ideological critique to social psychology. The psychology of the individual is an important agent in the rise of fascism. They did the first studies on the authoritarian personality and family structures (which turns out to be a key source of fascism).

2.) The Frankfurt School explained the self-reinforcing qualities of Capitalist social infra-structure and the process of power legitimation.  Our practical reason (ethical reasoning) is used to achieve freedom, but instead evolves into “Instrumental Reason,” (technology) to the point that there is an “Eclipse of Reason.” The Enlightenment has been replaced by positivism to reinforce Capitalism. The tendency of instrumental reason is to dominate both human beings and nature by a systemic internal process sustained by social organizations. Instrumental reason has redefined the meaning of human existence. Now “surplus repression” is necessary to exploit and maintain the flow of surplus value.

3.) The Frankfurt philosophers rethought the concept of the “Negative,” (the possible) as opposed to the “Positive”(the actual). Marcuse reformulated a method for critical negative dialectics, or the dialectics of imagination for possibilities by borrowing concepts from a.) Freud, the b.) Existentialists, c.) Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, d.) Hegel’s concept of "negation" and “determinate negation.” 

Adorno contributed his “Negative Dialectics”(1966) to re-define and refine a critical dialectical methodology (imminent critique) to derive contradictions from systems of concepts, and paradigms. The genetic influence of Hegelian Absolute Idealism in Marxism allows the critical theorists to shift the analysis from its historical emphasis of Marxist’s so called materialism --a Positivistic dialectic of actual existence--to a Negative dialectic of essences and possibility.

4.) Habermas attempted to bring a new hermeneutic, or principles of interpreting political theory. Capitalism has changed modern "politics" from the Greek “polis” of participation and attempts to reclaim communication from a distorted reality, and Orwellian contradictions.

I touched on many of these themes in this strange book of mine, but the two part video series on “Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part I” more clearly brings them all together. Part II is particularly well done.

Appendix A5

Critical Negative Thinking as the Logic of Protest and the Impoverishment of Experience

“… the "inner" dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking--the critical power of Reason--is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition” (One-Dimenisonal Man, Herbert Marcuse, Beacon,1964, p.13)(pdf).

Negative critical thinking is possibility thinking, of what could exist as opposed to what actually exists (positive). Critical thinking is often viewed as “utopian” thinking (οὐ, no; τόπος, place) especially when scientific empirical positivism is the dominant paradigm that de-realizes, discourage, and de-legitimizes this dimension of the cogitative inner self (Geist). The logic of domination (instrumental logic) results in the constriction of human experience—in the poverty of experience. This sublimated inner-dimension is where spiritual experience abides.

”The world of immediate experience-the world in which we find ourselves living-must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

In the equation Reason = Truth = Reality, which joins the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity, Reason is the subversive power, the “power of the negative” that establishes, as theoretical and practical Reason, the truth for men and things — that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are”(ibid., p.85). 

When we critically examine the appearances (phenomena) in the living stream of meaning-reality, they fade away into a cloud of quantum haze.

In spite of our “struggle against…absorption into the predominant one-dimensionality,” the universe is open.

Paul Tillich: The Open Universe and the Sacred

Appendix A6

I want to find the best video lectures on some of the key philosophers discussed in “A Theory of Spiritual Experience.” I once took a graduate level course on Hegel taught by Dr. David Carr reading mainly the Introduction to “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807). There were only about 15 students in the class. Dr. Carr is best known for translating Edmond Husserl’s “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”—Yes, that David Carr.

I only mentioned that to say philosopher Dr. Gregory B. Sadler has a free online YouTube paragraph-by-paragraph reading course of Hegel’s entire “The Phenomenology of Spirit”! Dr. Sadler is at paragraph 644 now! I’m trying to catch up by watching one lecture a day.  It’s unbelievable! 

Be sure to not miss his future lectures starting at paragraph 672 on Art, Religion, and Philosophy. This section on religion is where Paul Tillich learned systematic Christian theology!

Dr. Sadler delivers very clear commentary and interpretation—clearer than Hegel, for sure. I learned an awful lot from these marathon expert lectures and have already link to one of his insightful videos in one of my essays quoting Hegel.

Dr. Sadler is cool! However, he hoards chalk. 

Appendix A7

Biblical Economics through the ages.

Dr. Hudson explains why Christians hate Jesus so much.

Sociologist Jim Vrettos interviews Professor Michael Hudson, Economist, Wall St. Analyst, Political Consultant, Commentator and Journalist; who offers his views in the way finance works and how debt is actually a tool for oppression.

Dr. Hudson has written many books including:

• Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972)
• Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (1999)
• Killing the Host (2015)
• J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (2017)
• ...and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018)

Appendix A8

"Despair is suffering without meaning"-Victor Frankl 

(∀x)[Dx ⊃ (Sx * ~Mx)]

“The secret of Kant’s philosophy is the unthinkability of despair.”--Theodor Adorno

It is as if Dr. Frankl gave this interview yesterday. Frankl knew his chances of surviving the Nazi Death Camps were statistically 1 in 29.

Victor Frankl: Finding meaning in difficult times.