“Was ist die Aufgabe alles höheren Schulwesens?” – Aus dem Menschen eine Maschine zu machen. – “Was ist das Mittel dazu?” – Er muss lernen, sich langweilen. – “Wie erreicht man das?” – Durch den Begriff der Pflicht. – “Wer ist sein Vorbild dafür?” – Der Philolog: der lehrt ochsen. – “Wer ist der vollkommene Mensch?” – Der Staats-Beamte. – “Welche Philosophie giebt die höchste Formel für den Staats-Beamten?” – Die Kant’s: der Staats-Beamte als Ding an sich zum Richter gesetzt über den Staats-Beamten als Erscheinung. -

I forgot about Nietzsche’s cow, which has me convinced that I remembered him all the more.  Convenient!

p.s. Nietzsche’s cow is not to be confused with his camel, his lion, his snake, his eagle, his donkey, his human or his sister.

Throwing yourself bodily onto his introduction your ribs will be thoroughly massaged with the following:

There are, first, implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation.  It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed that formally expressed and argued for…

A hearty rib massage is never to be underestimated.  What a power this is, what a thing it would be to have the ability to string contemporary thoughts, attitudes and beliefs with their ancestors, undermining their virgin birth by pointing to the father.  This is a branch of philosophy that is associated with the history of philosophy.  That is one sexy branch – I would not lie to you.

What else could Lovejoy’s book do to your body without making this sexual?  Comb your eyebrows.  It is a soothing act that he accomplishes through philosophical semantics. Sacred words and phrases of a period or movement he says?  Comb my eyebrows I says.

I hold dear to my heart all works that strive against the idea of intellectual progress.  Knowledge is a giant wave in Mavericks, California that sweeps up all people in its path.  The educated and the non-educated become wrapped together in their watery somersaults.  Those that hold degrees distinguish themselves by proclaiming and pointing, “we’re going in this direction!” – forgetting that they are being propelled forward by cold, salty and sometimes unsanitary water.

Nobody likes metaphors, nobody likes being forced to read one and one can only feel embarrassed after having written one.  It is like having your pathetic creative powers strapped to your forehead – the perfect place of shame, since you cannot really see it yourself (delicious simile is not shameful).

I offer an example so as to stray from the eyebrows: the principle of plenitude.

What does it really mean to say that God is all powerful?  For Galileo and Descartes it meant the creation of a principle – the principle of plenitude, the principle of there being plenty of stuff.

The presumption from which we must reason, where other evidence is unavailable, is that what, so far as we can judge, is capable of being, is.  The production of an infinity of worlds was possible to the Creator [among many other awesome things - e.g. flying T-Rex]; and the principle [of plenitude] which we must always accept in such matters is that the possibility has been realized.

If all possibilities have been realized somewhere, meditates Descartes, then our position here in this world is not as special as our parents told us.  If this is the case we might as well detach our affections from the things of this world… and play in the chambers of our insanity (or, pure reason, depending on who you ask).

If Earth is not the center of all that is gnarly, if there are other worlds and if there is a creator that is infinitely powerful then there is a high chance that we have bretheren on Saturn.  It isn’t like God would invest time in creating a world and not put some creatures on it.  Let me be earnest, I would be a lot more interested in theology if the theologians were still worried about aliens and whether or not they have their own personal Jesus.  That is a serious conversation I could dig my teeth into.

I also meant to say that things like the principle of plenitude, although thought to be genial, new and intriguing, are, well, ridiculously not – like most genial ideas.

Am I embarrassed to be washing dishes while working on my dissertation?  A little bit.  Every once in a while I run into someone with a marketable area of study (physics, medicine, etc) and they tell me about the abundance of scholarships they have available to them.  They then pretend to sympathize that I have to wear an apron as I hand them their beer.

I’m not taking any courses so, academically, I’m just reading and writing on my own.  I tried to picture a life in Germany where I was only reading and writing, where I spent everyday in the library – leaving only to purchase coffee.  In this life I could briefly brag about my scholarships before crawling back into my hole – slowly beginning to call my dissertation, “my precious”, and losing what little skin tone I have left (man, I’m going to kick you where the sun don’t shine! Where? Germany?)

I’m actually quite satisfied with having to work.  It massages my sanity and makes this country a much less foreign place.

I do, however, have one academic project that pays and it is a translation project.  I took it on figuring I would just struggle through the translation and improve my German along the way.  I’ve never had to do something so frustrating.  I curse the incompatibility of German and English sentence structure as I cry on my keyboard.

I’m hoping to begin posting much more often again so let us not be strangers.

Last weekend I drove up to Cologne with some coworkers to celebrate the birthday of yet another coworker. To begin with I’m not the most outgoing guy – add the embarrassment of a foreign language and I turn into the silent weird guy who won’t leave the proximity of the two people he came with. There are still times when I can’t say what I want to say, there are still conversations I can’t have because the right words don’t come to mind and this has become plain frustrating. One of the guys I work with is from New Zealand and sometimes we take the train together. He recently began talking English to me (although we only speak German at work) and I sometimes forget to speak English and respond in German. My brain has placed German as “default language” in its interior settings and sometimes I have to pause to think about how to say something properly in English. My German is incomplete and my English is taking a nap (although writing is much easier). What’s most frustrating is that I haven’t noticed any improvement in my German in the last couple of months as if I have hit a plateau. I long for the gibe and banter that gets tossed back and forth between my friends in Santa Cruz.

I’m still waiting to hear from some scholarships. They promised to inform me by the end of March but I already check my email first thing after coming home from work. I have little hope of actually being awarded a scholarship but if I don’t receive one I will be stuck (yet again) trying to balance study and work – studying so much as to make progress on my dissertation and working so much as to be able to pay rent and eat. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if I could concentrate on my studies the entire time I was in Germany? I don’t regret having to work in archeology but that job might last just one more week. What comes next will most definitely be not as interesting or as fun. Receiving a scholarship might even make this venture seem plausible.

My head is spinning and sleep is holy.

If there are people out there looking for some helpful advice there currently is a discussion at A Philosophy Job Market Blog that is helpful. Don’t forget to read the comments to these posts because there are people who disagree -

Advice points 1 and 2 can be found here.

Advice point 3 can be found here.

I don’t want to give people the impression that I don’t recite sound arguments while showering because not only do I recite, I sing.

Senator Obama has a very sympathetic view towards education. He wants to lower tuition costs, to increase grants to students and research programs, and to increase teacher’s salaries (based on performance). I agree that these things should be done and that education should be more of a priority in our government’s spending. What struck me was why he thought spending should be increased and what he expected from this increase in spending. It boils down to a direct relationship between education and the economy. Increased government spending in learning is not so much an investment in the people as it is an investment in our economy. Nicely funded research programs stocked with well educated students will help keep the US competitive in the global economy. The more people we have entering engineering/physics/computer science programs the better chance innovative companies will be created – companies that will keep our economy afloat. Tax payers and politicians are meant to be soothed by the idea that money spent on education will have a high return.

Education = money. More education = more money. While reading this I was having flashbacks of reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I had a bearded man in the back of my head telling me that in a capitalistic society every institution finds its value in its monetary productiveness, that every relation is a monetary relation and that education is valuable if and only if it has a high return. Areas of study that don’t have a direct translation to the marketplace are devalued. Obama isn’t concerned if we stay competitive in literature, philosophy or the study of history (etc.) because these areas of study have no monetary worth. He even suggests that high school teachers of math and science should be paid more because what they teach has (yet again, monetary) worth.

Not that this is particularly anything new. Anyone studying in the Humanities at a University in the US knows the feeling of having to pay an ever increasing tuition, seeing their department experience cuts and walking past brand new buildings dedicated to the sciences. It is also happening in Germany.

To give Senator Obama some slack I highly doubt that any of the other candidates view education as something that deserves government spending because it is in itself valuable. I voted for the guy in my state’s primary and, if given the chance, will vote for him again. I am just incredibly turned off by this view of education and despair the future of our humanities.

The comic is brought to you by PhD Comics:

Reading philosophy papers and books requires a great deal of energy in itself. Reading philosophy papers and books in a foreign language is comatose-inducing. There have been plenty of times where I’ve sat down in our library with the fierce intent of attacking a text only to fall asleep, suddenly wake up and try to wipe away drool stains from an expensive book.

In respecting the company’s wishes I’m posting only the “uninformative” pictures I took (“uninformative” also means “not very exciting and or boring”). I’ll post the other pictures (full size even) once we’re completely done and I will reveal to the world all those enticing dirt formations that we’re currently keeping hidden.

The excavation is quite large – there is another long strip of holes and “stuff” around the corner to the right. The German winter isn’t the most comfortable environment to work in. Today I was shoveling in some blazing 29(ish) degree weather (Fahrenheit).

My hair turned white during the morning hours. It wasn’t snowing but my sweat crystallized to make me look like an old man.  The small box looking thing at the end is our shelter/tool shed.  From the far end of the excavation it is a good 5 – 7 minute walk to get there.

I’m afraid that is all that I can share without there being a threat of archaeological misconduct.  I do want to say that these holes (shown directly above) have completely gone through the “process” which includes: digging, cleaning, picture taking, drawing, coloring, describing and destroying.  These holes have been “destroyed” – we’re paid to make holes look pretty and then destroy them.  I just want to make sure there is no confusion since I take pride in our nice, beautiful holes in the ground.  Have I wasted your time?  Probably.  But hey – I promised pictures and I take promises seriously (think, “furled eyebrows”).

He feels completely out of his element in New York but feels somehow drawn to it. “New York affects me [...] like a foreign body in the eye, delicious and unbearable, evoking tears of emotion and all consuming fury. Perhaps this is what people call passion.”

New York is nothing without its sky. The buildings are impenetrable walls and the streets are an impenetrable floor – it is the sky that gives New York its beauty. Camus takes delight in the early mornings and early evenings when the colors of the sky strike the “gigantic tombstones,” the “square prisons” – the skyscrapers. He does, however, fear New York rain. “New York rain is a rain of exile” because it removes the sky from New York. The searching rain drops drive the pedestrian back into their gigantic tombstone.

“I loved New York, with that powerful love that sometimes leaves you full of uncertainties and hatred: sometimes one needs exile.”

Growing up in a small town in the coastal mountains of California I can relate to Camus’ reaction. I’ve never been to New York but after I left my forest encrusted town and moved to the land of suburbia I found myself asking, “how does one get dirty here?” And here in Heidelberg I miss the ocean – I can only look at the river with disdain and disappointment. Sometimes one needs exile.