The Framed Maelstrom

37 | M | Oregon

[the--framed--maelstrom]

It is important to bear in mind that the ‘world,’ the 'domain of all domains,’ 'that which is unequal to itself,’ 'unprethinkable Being,’ 'the absolute,’ etc., are always already part of the cobweb of predicates. This means that inconsistency is not a state of affairs, a primordial nameless tohubohu in the beginning happily waiting to be ordered by the divine word. It rather co-originates with logical space as such.

— Markus Gabriel, The Mythological Being of Reflection

[the--framed--maelstrom]

[fuckyeahwallpaintings]

Chapelle des moines de Berzé-la-Ville, Berzé-la-Ville, France, 12th century

uncovered and restored 1887

Photo: PMRMaeyaert / wikimedia commons

[vintageeurope]

Rome 1927

[by-grace-of-god]

Rorate Mass - St. Nicholas parish in Lisbon, Portugal

Photos 

[the--framed--maelstrom]

After you’ve lived in the north for long enough the thought of living in the low latitudes is terrifying. The sun alone would probably kill me in 3-5 days.

[fallingforfall13]

Alexa play “Eyes on fire by blue foundation” 🎶🌲🌫️

[the--framed--maelstrom]

But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear better and more sympathetic—but where do we look, if, no longer guided and protected by Homer’s hand, we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world? Only into night and horror, into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only by the children of the night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and death.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays

[the--framed--maelstrom]

To philosophize means to exist from ground. Philosophy is neither one science among others nor a production of world-views; it is more primordial than every science and, at the same time, more primordial than every world-view. The important thing is that we do it proper justice, that is, in philosophizing, we always transform each and every thing in ourselves and to ourselves. As long as we waiver back and forth on the surface by doubling theoretical and practical maxims, we are not yet in philosophy. Logic and metaphysics are grounded in the understanding-of-being that is determined by the ontological difference. The latter seems to us abstract, dry, and vacuous, and yet we must ask: What is the understanding-of-being? The freedom toward ground is the outstripping, in the upswing, of that which carries us away and gives us distance. The human being is a creature of distance! And only by way of the real primordial distance that the human in his transcendence establishes toward all beings does the true nearness to things begin to grow in him. And only the capacity to hear into the distance summons forth the awakening of the answer of those humans who should be near.

— Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

[onceuponastarryeye]

interesting dialogue in before sunrise (1995) (5/5)

[shetheyslain]

Crazy how you all know me as this funny glamorous blogger whereas in real life I’m the Belgian agricultural minister

[givememtnspls]

Olympic National Park

[lutnistas]

Philae Temple on Agilkia Island ( Aswan / Egypt )

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Michaelangelo, Bacchus

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God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity. Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things. With respect to these things, however, the good is not somewhere else; it is simply the point at which they grasp the taking-place proper to them, at which they touch their own non-transcendent matter.

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

[the--framed--maelstrom]

Ath. Must we not also affirm that since psyche (soul) is the archē kinēseōs (principle of motion), residing in and governing all that is in motion, it likewise governs the heavens?

Kl. Indeed.

Ath. As one or many? Certainly many—I shall answer for both of you. We must assume no fewer than two: one directing toward agathotēs (goodness), and the other capable of its contrary.

Kl. What you have said is most true.

Ath. So be it. Psyche, then, moves all things in the heavens, on earth, and in the sea through its energeiai (operations)—which manifest as boulēsis (willing), zētēsis (seeking), episkopēsis (supervision), bouleusis (deliberation), doxa orthē kai pseudēs (true and false opinion), chara (joy), lypē (grief), tharsos (boldness), phobos (fear), misein (hatred), and epithymia (desire)—and through all other kinēseis (motions) akin to these or primary; these govern the secondary kinēseis (motions) of bodies, causing genesis (coming into being) and phthora (perishing), diakrisis (separation) and synthesis (combination), and all that follows—heat and cold, weight and lightness, hardness and softness, brightness and darkness, bitterness and sweetness. Psyche (soul) makes use of these, and when it aligns with nous (intellect)—the true thearchia (divine rule)—it leads all things toward eutaxia (order) and eudaimonia (flourishing), but when it associates with anoia (lack of intelligence), it engenders the contrary in all things. Shall we affirm these principles as true, or do we still doubt that it may be otherwise?

Plato, Laws (Dionysius the Areopagite Narration)

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The Pauline hōs mē seems to be a special type of tensor, for it does not push a concept’s semantic field toward that of another concept. Instead, it sets it against itself in the form of the as not: weeping as not weeping. The messianic tension thus does not tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the indifference between one thing and its opposite. The apostle does not say: “weeping as rejoicing” nor “weeping as [meaning =] not weeping,” but “weeping as not weeping.” According to the principle of messianic klēsis, one determinate factical condition is set in relation to itself—the weeping is pushed toward the weeping, the rejoicing toward the rejoicing. In this manner, it revokes the factical condition and undermines it without altering its form. [...] In pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end. This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of this world. To live messianically means “to use” klēsis; conversely, messianic klēsis is something to use, not to possess. [...] The messianic vocation is not a right, nor does it furnish an identity; rather, it is a generic potentiality [potenza] that can be used without ever being owned. To be messianic, to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-factical property (circumcised/uncircumcised; free/slave; man/woman) under the form of the as not. This expropriation does not, however, found a new identity; the “new creature” is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old.

— Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)

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Chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there is little chronos. Look at the extraordinary interlacing of these two concepts, they are literally placed within each other. Kairos does not have another time at its disposal; in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos. [...] That messianic “healing” happens in kairos is evident, but this kairos is nothing more than seized chronos. The pearl embedded in the ring of chance is only a small portion of chronos, a time remaining. (Hence the pertinence of the rabbinic apologue, for which the messianic world is not another world, but the secular world itself, with a slight adjustment, a meager difference. But this ever so slight difference, which results from my having grasped my disjointedness with regard to chronological time, is, in every way, a decisive one.)

— Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)