Corn, Turnip, Asparagus

Well, finally got the internet installed in my apartment. Gave me something to do for the four days of constant rain that we received. Though, I did brave the elements on Sunday for a conference on Merleau-Ponty. Was an awesome conference, with many insights onto M-P, especially on passages from his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. Had about 9 PhDs giving papers, from Boston College to Harvard to University of Freiburg. So, all in all, well worth venturing into the rain. On a sidenote, via one of the papers (given by John Sallis) I was introduced to the art of Paul Klee. I would encourage everyone to check out some of his artwork, it's very good to say the least.

I have also been trying to get my paper for my Philosophy of Imagination class underway, as I have all of these ideas bouncing around in my head and I need to write them down before they bounce out of an ear and escape into the ether. I did manage to write a few lines the other night, thus beginning the path that I think the introduction will fall, and thus creating the road that the entire paper will traverse. I am working on writing the paper on Cain's legacy via the revolutionary use of his imagination, and use the Cain and Abel murder story as the beginning of ethics qua imaginary ethics, or primordial ethics. I begin with a quote from Nietzsche his Gay Science:

“ Good and evil are the prejudices of God” - said the snake.

To enter into the realm of the moral, to discuss good and evil in light of a past event, or the possibility of a future consequence, to conjecture on the implication of a particular action in a particular time and in a particular context, is to enter into the realm of the ethical and the historical: both ethics and history find their foundation in the imaginative, in man's central position in the midst of imagined omni-possibility, in the necessity for man to simultaneously live and create. For this is the fate of man as seen through the foci of imagination: our doom is to create our future. We can become immortal in what makes us ultimately human: the fact that we exist historically allows our actions to become our immortal scions and through action and consequence we attain an immortality that is separate from the mere notion of immortality as not dying.


Again, this is just some ideas that I have, and I wrote this more stream-of-consciousness than actually planned and carefully constructed. It is of course, subject to change, but I think that it's a good beginning, or at least fertile ground upon which to plant a good beginning.

More as it develops.

--Philip