Gerhard Richter is perhaps the greatest living painter. He is certainly the most versatile one, moving freely from astounding photorealism to grey monochrome, with several stops between these two extremes. He is also famously circumspect, deflecting questions about the meaning of his work with a flat insistence that it means nothing at all: this even as it weaves in its subject matter through many of the most momentous events of the 20th century —events Richter himself witnessed up close—, not least the Second World War and the bombing of Dresden. His claim is all the more implausible in light of what we know of his personal connection to many of his paintings’ human subjects: a beloved bipolar aunt sacrificed to Nazi eugenicism; a sinister gynecologist father-in-law who was himself, by remarkable coincidence, the immediate cause of this sacrifice; a pregnant nude wife descending a staircase; a daughter, Betty, who plainly shares in the essence of both the aunt and the wife. Often working from photographs, Richter’s paintings do not so much show us the photograph itself as the experience of looking at a photograph — of a loved one, of a hated one, of family living and dead and heavy with memory and trauma, receding into the past but still, always, defining the shape and the inescapable weight of the present.

Last November Ren, Justin, and Adina went to the massive retrospective of Richter’s seven-decade career, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton outside of Paris in the Bois de Boulogne. Ren hated the building, a Frank Gehry rush job that looks, he says, like an overturned yacht. Justin in turn hated the Florian von Donnersmark film, Werk ohne Autor [Never Look Away] (2018), that shows us a fictionalized version of Richter’s life, but with a narrative arc and an emotional tenor dictated entirely by Hollywood. Nonetheless, Ren and Justin agree on more or less everything else: that Richter’s greatest innovation comes in 1965, with the discovery of the photographic blur technique; that the color panels and monochromes are stunning too, but that it is impossible to make any sense of them independently of what we know of the entire range of his work; that the smear paintings of the 1980s and ‘90s reflect the cynicism of the art world’s increasing financialization in that same era; that the grey-scale paintings documenting the end of the Baader-Meinhof gang are powerful indeed; that the late-career Birkenau paintings are Richter’s greatest aesthetic failure and maybe even his greatest moral failure; and, again, that Gerhard Richter is perhaps the greatest living painter.

Ren prepared an exquisite presentation of more than sixty vivid slides, most of them reproductions of Richter’s work, and the discussion moves through them chronologically, from the early DDR work (which Richter has disowned), to the drawings of the most recent years (Richter, 94, is still active, but has retired from painting). Ren guides us through it all with his significant art-historical insight, anchored in Vermeer and Vélasquez, as knowledgeable as anyone who is not Richter can be about the deep sources of Richter’s work. Justin nods enthusiastically and tries to keep up.

The exhibit ends on March 2, which is to say tomorrow, so this virtual guided tour, initially conceived as something of an advertisement for the exhibit, will instead, most likely, unless you get moving this very instant, have to serve as a substitute for it instead. Not a bad consolation, in our strong opinion. —The Editors

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We recently had two much discussed pieces here at The Hinternet: “The Trump Restoration” and “The Internet Is Killing Science Too”. Like other publications confronting the stark reality that almost n…

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Ulrich, the protagonist of Robert Musil’s unfinished and perhaps unfinishable novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930-1944), is a philosopher in denial. In the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Musil’s hero, torn between various love affairs, rages against the limits of philosophy and the futility of thought. “Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons,” he despairs, “who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system.”    

And so it is with some relief that I announce that a true philosopher by both vocation and avocation —the singular Agnes Callard— will be defending her profession on this episode of the Hinternet Symposium, where she and Justin Smith-Ruiu discuss one of the great works of modernist literature. For both Justin and Agnes, The Man Without Qualities is a novel heavy with nostalgia. Both came across Robert Musil while learning German as graduate students, and both retain a fondness for his tortured protagonist’s esoteric displays of anti-philosophy.

Give it a listen! If you enjoy it, please do subscribe below — this is just the beginning of The Hinternet’s podcast escapade. We hope you’ll join us for it.

—OWJ
Managing Editor, The Hinternet

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Some Ridiculous AI-generated Sound Bites:

• “I read him early in grad school.”

• “Ulrich is not a philosopher.”

• “The world is not fixed.”

And AI’s attempt at dividing Agnes and Justin’s conversation, which in fact forms a continuum, into discrete units:

00:00 Introduction to Musil and the Conversation
03:46 Exploring The Man Without Qualities
08:54 Ulrich’s Philosophical Dilemma
14:16 The Search for Identity and Freedom
17:02 Historical Context and Decadence
20:47 Political Satire and the Absurd
27:12 The Nature of Autonomy
29:11 The Role of Moosbrugger
35:01 Musil’s Intellectual Aesthetic
40:06 Navigating Philosophical Conversations
43:01 The Role of Fiction in Philosophy
45:51 Exploring the Crisis of Intellect
48:46 The Nature of Love and Connection
53:34 The Soul and Its Absence
58:17 Cultural Commentary and Intellectual Discourse

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Hello again, dear readers… and listeners and watchers too! I’m back with the second installment in the “Hinternet Symposion” podcast series, on a topic I’ve taught and thought a lot about over the years. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

I’m still experimenting with video podcasting possibilities, learning what works and what doesn’t, so as I implored you before, please be patient when you encounter any remaining glitches and hitches.

I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do, and share here, above the fold, Riverside Studio’s AI-generated “show notes”. Do you hate them? They certainly do not sound like they were written by me, do they? And yet, as Leibniz might have said, they do the drudge work, of transmitting the essential idea of what this show is about, so that I can do the enjoyable work of bringing the topic to life.

Below the fold I will include a bibliography for further reading. Please upgrade to a paid subscription to access it, or to access the podcast itself. For now I’m still making podcasts available to all paid subscribers, but once the “Deep Dives” start I will be making all podcast content available only to “Hinternet Symposion” subscribers, so I recommend upgrading as soon as you can.

Thanks for your support, friends.

—JSR

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AI-Generated Show Notes

Summary: In this episode, Justin Smith-Ruiu discusses the history and philosophy of astrobiology, focusing on antiquity through the 18th century. He explores the reasons why people started talking about aliens at a certain moment in history and how it is connected to the collapse of the sublunar and superlunar boundary. He also touches on the current state of astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life. The concept of extraterrestrials has evolved over time, from celestial intelligences to more animal-like entities. The representation of aliens as reptilian may be connected to the rise of the theory of evolution.

Keywords: astrobiology, history, philosophy, antiquity, 18th century, aliens, extraterrestrial life, sublunar, superlunar, celestial intelligences, reptilian, evolution

Takeaways:

• The history and philosophy of astrobiology can be traced back to antiquity through the 18th century.

• The concept of extraterrestrial life has evolved over time, from celestial intelligences to more animal-like entities.

• The collapse of the sublunar and superlunar boundary in the 17th century transformed the perception of celestial intelligences.

• The representation of aliens as reptilian may be connected to the rise of the theory of evolution.

• The search for extraterrestrial life is limited by our current understanding and assumptions about life forms.

Sound Bites:

• “Why did people start talking about aliens at a certain moment in history?”

• “The collapse of the sublunar and superlunar boundary transformed the perception of celestial intelligences.”

• “The representation of aliens as reptilian may be connected to the rise of the theory of evolution.”

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:51 The Current State of Astrobiology

07:55 The Collapse of the Sublunar-Superlunar Boundary

14:59 The Biologization of Celestial Intelligences

24:55 Reptilian Aliens and the Theory of Evolution

35:01 The Limitations of Our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

47:52 Conclusion

Below the fold: Recommendations for further reading, in the form of a syllabus for a 14-week course (or indeed a podcast “deep dive”) that I hope to launch soon.

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Sitting here in the Hotel Moldova, 50 miles or so from the Ukrainian border, I decided to record my first proper “Hinternet Symposion” podcast on a topic of some regional interest. This is also the topic of one of my current book projects, the working title of which is The Philosopher and the Tsar: Leibniz, Russia, and the Making of a Modern Scientific Empire. As is my intention for these Symposion podcasts for the next months at least, it is a resolutely serious presentation, and a glimpse of the sort of work I have been doing in recent years as a scholar, but still, I hope, of interest to non-scholars.

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That said, the truth is that for now I am still mostly just test-driving podcast platforms and possibilities, and at this early moment I am well aware that what I have managed to do here lacks the polish I will be learning to apply as I work on the next installments. By polish I mean both high production value, but also wide accessibility with respect to the content — I’m particularly sorry, for example, for the original-language quotations in some of the slides. I’ll do better, I promise.

For now and for the next few months, I will be making all Symposion podcasts available to paid Hinternet subscribers, but if you enjoy them I strongly encourage you to upgrade, now, to a “Hinternet Symposion” subscription, as soon they will be exclusive paywalled content reserved for Symposion subscribers alone.

If you find you enjoy this podcast or those to come, I would be so grateful if you were to let others know about them. I’m trying to start something new and different and a bit risky here, drawing on the competencies I’ve developed over the past quarter century as a university professor, but also hoping to use these competencies in a new way. In order for this to work, I need a public. I’ll certainly try to earn it in the coming months, and will be forever grateful to those who helped to give it a push at the very beginning.

There will be a lot more to come, including “deep dives” consisting in several episodes focused on a single topic; there will be guests, there will be interactive live-streaming, there will be all sorts of stuff. We’re starting small, but aiming, as one must, ad astra.

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