Log24

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Object Lesson

Yesterday's post on the current Museum of Modern Art exhibition
"Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests a renewed look at
abstraction and a fundamental building block: the cube.

From a recent Harvard University Press philosophical treatise on symmetry—

The treatise corrects Nozick's error of not crediting Weyl's 1952 remarks
on objectivity and symmetry, but repeats Weyl's error of not crediting
Cassirer's extensive 1910 (and later) remarks on this subject.

For greater depth see Cassirer's 1910 passage on Vorstellung :

IMAGE- Ernst Cassirer on 'representation' or 'Vorstellung' in 'Substance and Function' as 'the riddle of knowledge'

This of course echoes Schopenhauer, as do discussions of "Will and Idea" in this journal.

For the relationship of all this to MoMA and abstraction, see Cube Space and Inside the White Cube.

"The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear…." — Brian O'Doherty

Saturday, December 22, 2012

For George Steiner…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

… In gratitude for his book Real Presences

Will and Idea:

A related shell game:

Ad for a talk at Harvard by Nick Bostrom in April 2010—

Click ad for background on the April 10 , 2010, symposium.

See also Bostrom on the The Simulation Argument
and the Log24 April 12, 2010, Shell Game post above.

Note the black diamond logo of Bostrom's Oxford institute.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Immersion

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

      Part of a New York Times  banner ad last night—

IMAGE- 'Fashion Week: Immerse Yourself'

     (Fashion week dates 2012 — 
     New York Sept. 6-13, London Sept. 14-18,
     Milan Sept. 19-25, Paris Sept. 25-Oct. 3.)

     Some related prose suggested by a link in
     last night's Log24 post

The theory, he had explained, was that the persona
was a four-dimensional figure, a tessaract in space,
the elementals Fire, Earth, Air, and Water permutating
and pervolving upon themselves, making a cruciform
(in three-space projection) figure of equal lines and
ninety degree angles.

The Gameplayers of Zan , a novel by M. A. Foster

IMAGE- Immersion in a fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

      See also, if you can find a copy, Jeff Riggenbach's 
      "Science Fiction as Will and Idea," Riverside Quarterly 
       Vol. 5, No. 3 (whole number 19, August 1972, ed. by
       Leland Sapiro et al.), 168-177.

      Some background—
      Tuesday's Simple Skill and 4D Ambassador,
      as well as Now What? from May 23, 2012.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Simple Skill

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:18 am

But with good Will
To show our simple skill…

( Continued from Midsummer Eve, 1993 )

The "Black Diamond" search from Holy Cross Day 
leads to Talk Amongst Yourselves, which in turn
leads to PyrE in the Book, with Alfred Bester's
version of "Will and Idea."

This phrase may be regarded as a version of 
Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation."

Related material—

"Schopenhauer's notion of the will comes from the Kantian thing-in-itself, which Kant believed to be the fundamental reality behind the representation that provided the matter of perception, but lacked form. Kant believed that space, time, causation, and many other similar phenomena belonged properly to the form imposed on the world by the human mind in order to create the representation, and these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer pointed out that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated, so the thing-in-itself must be one and all things that exist, including human beings, must be part of this fundamental unity. Our inner-experience must be a manifestation of the noumenal realm and the will is the inner kernel* of every being. All knowledge gained of objects is seen as self-referential, as we recognize the same will in other things as is inside us." —Wikipedia

* "Die Schrecken des Todes beruhen großentheils auf dem falschen Schein, daß jetzt das Ich verschwinde, und die Welt bleibe, Vielmehr aber ist das Gegentheil wahr: die Welt verschwindet; hingegen der innerste Kern des Ich, der Träger und Hervorbringer jenes Subjekts, in dessen Vorstellung allein die Welt ihr Daseyn hatte, beharrt." 

— Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Kapitel 41

Added Nov. 16, 2012, a translation by E. F. J. Payne—

"The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence."

THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

by Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes
© 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.
© 1958 by The Falcon's Wing Press

Volume Two: Supplements to the Fourth Book, 
XLI. On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature

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