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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2970 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I am reading Paul Klee's notebooks, texts which hugely shaped the modernist Bauhaus approach to design and architecture during their attempts to bring all the arts under one umbrella. These texts are held to be as important for modern art as da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Here is how the notebooks begin:

"Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos. Utter chaos can never be put on a scale, but will remain forever unweighable and unmeaurable. It can be Nothing or a dormant Something, death or birth, according to the dominance of will or lack of will, of willing or not willing. The pictorial symbol for this non-concept is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point. The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions."

"The cosmogenetic moment is at hand. The establishment of a point in chaos, which, concentrated in principle, can only be grey, lends this point a concentric character of the primordial. The order thus created radiates from it in all directions. When central importance is given to a point: this is the cosmogenetic moment. To this occurrence corresponds the idea of every sort of beginning (e.g. procreation) or better still, the concept of the egg."

This absolute tripe goes on for two whole volumes spanning 2,500 pages, and was turned into lectures for Bauhauslers.

This makes perfect sense if you've read Heideigger and Freud. The notion of the egg is easily understandable as the development of the id and superego as differentiable personality traits or development of the self, and being and becoming is basically a direct quote reference to Heidegger, lichtung etc. Reading this out of context without understanding the underlying work is like cracking open Topics in Orbit Equivalence by Kechris if you haven't read or understood Abstract Algebra by Judson. I'm not even a fan or deep-understander of this art movement but there is obviously some intellectual depth to the people who engage in this stuff.

I know of continental philosophy and have read some of it; I just don't like or assign any weight to that philosophical tradition at all. Frankly it comes off to me as consisting of a lot of very broad and often borderline metaphysical statements made without any empirical or logical basis, and their philosophy almost feels completely arbitrary, with their terms being so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them. Many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty, I wouldn't say that is the case with prominent continental philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger. Much of it falls into the category of not even wrong.

The concept of being (sein) is just the word for the concept of existence and presence in the world. Becoming (werden) is the state of constant change. Being and becoming are related in the sense that being is a point in, or snapshot of, the state of becoming. Heidegger's Lichtung, the "clearing", elucidates the concept of ontological Being through an analogy of a light in a clearing where beings are revealed as beings, where beings nevertheless obscure each other leading to concealment which results in the ability to form misconception and self-deception. I don't feel like I learn anything particularly meaningful about being through this, I feel as if I'm hearing somebody's kooky unfalsifiable ruminations about what it means to exist, and to extend these concepts to design (e.g. calling grey "the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away" because it is in between white and black) elevates the whole endeavour to monumental levels of meaninglessness. There is no lens through which these statements can even be whatsoever critically appraised or evaluated.

..did you lose a bet, or why are you subjecting yourself to this sort of writing?

The answer is that my partner studied design, and given how much he's talked about Bauhaus in the past I'm trying to see if his positive view of them is warranted.

I am quickly discovering that the emperor has no clothes.

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