Minkowski’s Measure

Minkowski's Measure. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

“I say that I am expressing myself in an inexact manner. This is true. This imperfection, however, is not due to the insufficiency of the means at my disposal but result from the fact that becoming does not try to be expressed. What I mean to say is that, in its mysterious power, becoming leaves no island upon which we can set foot in order to arrive at a definition or a judgement in its regard. With its waves is covers over all that we might be tempted to set over against it. It known neither subjects nor objects. I has neither distinct parts, nor direction, nor beginning, nor end. It is neither reversible nor irreversible. It is universal and impersonal. It becomes chaotic.  And yet, it is quite close to us, so close that it constitutes the very base of our life. We would almost like to say that it is the synonym of life in the broadest sense of the word.”

Eugène Minkowski: Lived Time. Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, translated by Nancy Metzel, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970 page 18.

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Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation, Prague 2008. (c)

“Let us proceed to the exposition. Spiritual Europe has a birthplace. By this I mean not a geographical birthplace, in one land, though this is also true, but rather a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in individual men and human groups of this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Here there arises a new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding world. And its consequences is the breakthrough of a completely new sort of spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically self-enclosed cultural form; the Greek called it philosophy. Correctly translated, in the original sense, that means nothing other than universal science, science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is. Soon the interest in the All, and thus the question of the all-encompassing becoming and being in becoming, begins to particularize itself according to the general forms and regions of being, and thus philosophy, the one science branches out into many particular sciences.”

Edmund Husserl: “The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology”, Northers University Press, 1970, page 276. Translated by David Carr.

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The barebones visualisation of this quote from Husserl it right here. You have seen it many times already.

the living present (pitstop)

 

Robert Sokolowski:

“The actual segment of conscious life, the lebendige Gegenwart, is an absolute concretum because everything happens within it: remembering, expecting, perceiving, judging, being passively affected, and even doing phenomenology – all are nested inside the living present, while it is not nested inside anything else. We cannot get down to anything more basic because all further divisions – into central impressions and retentions, for instance – are abstractive. The living present is the theater in which the whole spectacle of conscious life is available for phenomenological viewing. Even the past and future are present only inside it; the living present is a present for my past and future”. 

Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, Northwestern University Press, Evanston , USA, 1974. Pages 158-159. 

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Picture by blog author.