A Trip to Europe One Year Ago, & A Trip Back in Memory to Park Ridge & Arkansas

A Trip to Europe One Year Ago
Tomorrow is one year since my trip to Europe began research into the intellectual and event history of the countries of my family. My trip began Oct. 17th in Berlin with a stroll down Unter den Linden and an inquiry into the possibility of travel in Russia- of course safety factors are a concern with plans to travel there. Most will remember that day politically as a day of "irresponsible rhetoric".

Berlin and Germany are important intellectually as Hegel wrote much in Berlin, and as so many of the towering figures in the history of Philosophy from the 18th to the 20th Centuries came from Germany. It is also the place where the single worst Philosophy on written record was published.(Mein Kampf)

I took a bus tour of Berlin, and enjoyed strolling down Kurfurstendamm and eating at Reinhards(?) restaurant in the mornings for the awesome breakfast buffet. Le Monde and the Financial Times were the newspapers of choice since I don't speak or read German, and I bumped into Clive Owen buying his movie ticket in line in front of me at the Potsdammer Platz movie theater.

I saw checkpoint Charlie, but for me there was no need to visit any of the tourist sites involved with the Nazis. The more important truths of the falseness in the thinking and the hate in the hearts and action of that group are found in Mein Kampf and in the pictures and chronicles of the Holocaust- especially in the victim and witness statements of the Shoah foundation.

I was in Berlin until the 24th, when I took a train to Paris. There I enjoyed sight seeing and walking around Paris for two days. Paris is magnificent. I walked and saw the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the St. Germaine area, the Eiffel Tower, the bridges over the Seine and other sights.

I had been to France twice, in 1992 & 1994, on trips to Nice visiting former Chicago restaurant coworkers/friends and their families. One of the families has a fantastic restaurant called La Mere Germaine, on the shore of the bay of Ville Franche Sur Mer. It is the same bay that is shown in the beginning of 'Romancing the Stone'. The same pier street of the Restaurant(Quai Courbet), along with the Restaurant, are featured in the movie 'Ronin'.-(where Deniro asks about the post office and waits in the restaurant for the phone call)

On the 27th I took a train From Paris through the chunnel to London for two days of walking around London. There the London Premier of the 2nd Elizabeth movie was held in a Leicester Square theater- red carpet scene and all. I stayed in a hotel across Westminister Bridge from Parliament, and saw the Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall and other sights in that section of the city. It was my 2nd trip to London(1994).

The Sunday Times showed the slippage in modern journalism standards that weekend- I think the 29th- with three stories. The first was a story of a Buckingham Palace worker that claimed drug use by a member of the Royal family- without any supporting material evidence. The 2nd was a story on the BBC managing director calling some long time female friend of his a bad name- without any supporting evidence and with the female friend denying the possibility of it. The third was a story about the allegation of a false Curriculum Vitae of a female minority cabinet member in Sarkozy's cabinet- WITHOUT the Times or the accuser having possession of the CV!!

Three stories in the Sunday London Times(two on the front page)without ANY evidence. I thought this was a testament to the sad state of affairs and declining level of professional journalism.

A Trip Back in Memory To Park Ridge, & Arkansas
Growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, from a young age I was interested in Law. I think this is what eventually led me to Philosophy. This sprang from two sources:

a) the world book encyclopedia set purchased by my parents- which I read cover to cover, over and over...

b) Meeting a female relative when my grandmother Dorothy (Thompson) Stripeik took us(my mother Lorraine and I) over to her parents' house in Park Ridge. Although I was much younger, she was very nice and spent some time talking with me. She was warm, confident, VERY smart and I remember asking her questions about college. I thought she was "soooo cool", and told my mother and grandmother so.

I remember that either she was in college and planning on attending Yale law school, or was already attending law school. It probably was the former. I think I remember seeing her one other time while with my mother, as we ran into her and her mother in downtown Chicago shopping on State street.

Anyway, since I was the oldest grandchild on both sides of our family- (as were my parents and their parents* etc. etc.)- and since I was interested in and enjoyed reading so much, after meeting her I thought that going to college and being a lawyer would both be soooo cool.

Turns out that that interest in reading led to Philosophy, which I think worked out MUCH better for me.

(Of course reading would take a back seat during summer vacation trips with cousins to my grandmother Dorothy's house in the Arkansas Ozarks in Henderson, near Mountain Home, after they moved there in the early 70's. There my grandfather would take us fishing on Lake Norfork, with two trips to the White River for trout fishing).

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young- 'Teach Your Children'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKySbfgvyVw

Philosophical "White Water"- Oops, Read Again

******Looking back, it was clear after the first three essays of 'The Kant Variations' were written that the work being produced was effectively supporting the position of the Kant/St. Paul group. The essays were written from 1987 to 1990 at night on the computers of Intersport Television. The first three essays were 'Synthesis in Kant's Aesthetical Idea', 'Emmanuel Levinas and the Love of Knowledge' and 'Theodor Adorno and Negative Dialectics: Composition on the Threshold of Tragic Sympathy'.

It was also clear that the work being produced had a much more benign view of human nature than the almost completely dark view espoused by the Hobbes/Darwin Group.

One could say that as a philosophical "beverage"- to use the jargon of the Heidegger conference attendees- it probably appeared to be "white water" for that group because of the piece on forgiveness. At that point it was probably considered too "light" and non-functional for that group.

This evaluation would later prove to be incorrect as: 1) the functional aspects of forgiveness became more fully elaborated in the notion of "active identity" put forth in 'Unity in the House of Reason', and demonstrable in the treatment of trauma; 2) the ontological rooting of the sensus communis is implied in the piece on Adorno; which then 3) puts the theory of beauty as "populated" in the reordering function of each individual- as elaborated in 'Synthesis in..'- on more solid footing.

This all helps to make the Philosophical 'House' constructed by the "New Balance" Kant/St. Paul Group, and supported by 'The Kant Variations', a very very very fine house.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young- 'Our House'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDpHpbllByg