Tractations III: Ostension

This is the World.

That's how it is.

This is the case.

These are my views.

These are my eyes.

[This is my body.]

This is my mind.

This is the image.

This is my heart.

[This is my body.]

These are my hands.

These are my deeds.

This is the story.

That's what happened.

This is History.

Tractations II

Everything is the case.

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

Science represents the facts (not things).

Philosophy presents concepts, not thoughts.

Art renders the image.*

Poetry presents emotions, not feelings.

Politics represents the acts (not people).

History is the totality of acts, not people.

Everyone is on my case.

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*Added March 24, 2012.

Tractations I

The world is everything that is the case, the totality of facts.

Science is the attempt to construct true propositions about the facts (assertions).

Politics is the attempt to construct just propositions about the acts (injunctions).

History is everyone that is on my case, the totality of acts.

Political Actvities

Over at my other blog, I've been discussing Heidegger's interpretation of modern science as "ongoing activity" (Betrieb) and the danger of letting it degenerate into "mere busyness" (des blossen Betriebs). I think it is the task of the philosopher precisely to keep science "open" in the sense Heidegger suggests: "Ongoing activity becomes mere busyness whenever, in the pursuing of its methodology, it no longer keeps itself open on the basis of an ever-new accomplishing of its projection plan..."

Well, the same can be said of poetry and politics. The poet works to keep politics open in the pursuit of its mandate. Obviously, the philosopher has to keep the scientist thinking. The poet, likewise, has to keep the politician feeling. Without this, politics degenerates into mere busyness (and becomes a business) and, just as science can succumb to it and "never again confirms and verifies its own self-accumulating results and the calculation of them, but simply chases after such results and calculations", so too can politics fail to ratify and justify its results and simply chase after ballots and opinion polls.

Ontics Optics Haptics Ethics

Maybe McGinn, an onticist, a proper philosopher, looks very carefully at things to inquire into their being. The ethicist, properly speaking a poet, should touch people very daringly to govern their becoming.