Of course, man is his own worst enemy: his own secret and insidious enemy. Wherever the seeds of evil are scattered, they are almost certain to grow. Whereas it takes amazingly good luck for the smallest grain of good not to be stifled.
— Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
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The ulterior motives [Hintergedanken] with which you take Evil into yourself are not your own, but those of Evil.
— Kafka, aphorism no. 29, 1917
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Doing the negative is imposed on us; the positive is already within us.
— Kafka, aphorism no. 27, 1917
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If there aren’t countless opportunities for liberation, and especially opportunities at every moment of our lives, then perhaps there are none at all.
— Kafka, letter to Brod, 1917
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How are you going even to touch on the greatest task… if you can’t collect yourself so that when the decisive moment comes, you hold in your hand the entirety of yourself like a stone to be flung.
— Kafka, Octavo Notebook, 1917 (tr. Frisch)
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Casually and imperiously, as if at home, the racket of the world streamed in and out through the bars, the prisoner was actually free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could even have left the cage, after all, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.
— Kafka, Diary, 1921 (tr. Frisch)
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The vastness of the campus, the Organisational Management campus. They’ll bring everything here – the rest of the university. It’s all going to be reinvented here.
The Organisational Management maw! Swallowing everything! Scooping up everything. Swallowing the humanities, in one gulp…
Soon, the rest of the university will be brought here. Relocated here. Soon, the whole university will be reborn on the Organisational Management campus! Soon it won’t just be Philosophy in Organisational Management, but History. But Geography. But Physics! But Politics! But the Fine Arts! But Mathematics!
And History will be the history of the application of Organisational Management. Geography can be about the still uneven application of Organisational Management. Politics can be about the technocratic perfection of Organisational Management. The Fine Arts can be about the décor of Organisational Management: of its glass and steel foyers. About the public spaces of its new campuses.
And Philosophy will concern Organisational Management as a philosophy. About Organisational Management not so much as a subject area, but as a way of doing things. A practice. A methodology, if you like. As a logic. As a way of approaching problems. The problem of life! The problem of everything!
*
Soon, everyone will be studying Organisational Management… Nothing but Organisational Management…
Organisational Management, becoming the all-subject. The ur-subject. All unis will essentially be Organisational Management unis, nothing else. They’ll simply be about organisation! And management!
In the beginning, there was Philosophy, and all the other disciplines split off from Philosophy. In the end, there will only be Organisational Management, as all the other disciplines will have been subsumed by Organisational Management.
Which is why the move to Organisational Management must be understood in its chiliastic dimension, we agree. In its eschatological dimension. As what is happening everywhere, but in miniature.
[…]
Helmut, performing one of his famous etymological analyses.
The essence of Organisational Management is neither organisational nor managerial, he says. Organisation – from the Greek organon, meaning organ. The term emerged in mid fifteenth century, as act of organising, which came from the medieval Latin organizationem. Sense of ‘that which is organised’ by 1807. Meaning ‘system, establishment’, from 1873.
Manage, from the Latin non manus, hand and agere, to act. To handle, train or direct a horse: that’s what the word, manage meant in the 1560s. Being shaped by physical manipulation: that’s what it means in the 1670s. Governing body of a collective: that’s what it meant in 1739. The word management to refer to the act of managing by direction is first used in the late sixteenth century.
And what happens when you combine the words? Helmut asks, rhetorically. They’re essentially saying the same thing. An organisation is managed. Management happens through organisation. That’s what changes.
*
Organisational Management! Business Studies – that was the old name… A dead name… But now, Organisational Management is naming itself as such. It’s coming out into the open as exactly what it is. It doesn’t need to disguise itself any longer.
Organisational Management can be brazen – quite open. It can walk in daylight. It can be abroad. There it is, unabashed, unashamed, nothing other than what it is.
*
And what’s the role of Philosophy in all this? The etymology of philosophy: we all know that. Unlimited desire. Infinite yearning. Eros, as Plato would say.
Does Organisational Management know that? Do they sense something missing in Organisational Management – a kind of philosophical phantom limb? Maybe they want more. Maybe they Desire. Yearn in their own way. In an Organisational Management way.
They’d like to be more than they are. They’re all about logistics. And order. They’re all about procedures. About methodology. But they want something else. They’re not sure what they want, but they think it might be us.
This merger… This mind meld… Do they want to tame us, or untame themselves? Do they want to bind us or loosen themselves? It’s about a double becoming. A becoming-organisational-management of philosophy: that’s what they want, explicitly. But won’t there also be a becoming-philosophy-of-organisational-management?
The secret of Organisational Management: Organisational Management masochism. Organisational Management self-loathing. Perhaps Organisational Management is weary of being what it is. Perhaps Organisational Management wants philosophy to decomplete it. To part-destroy it. Perhaps Organisational Management wants to be opened up, to bloom. To unfold all its dimensions. And we’re part of that…
— Spurious, via here
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My book, The Moment, is available from Splice.
‘The Moment is the journal of a profound and moving endeavour: the attempt to renew a faith in life through the act of writing. Reflecting on everyday life in the Norfolk countryside as well as some of the richest literary, philosophical and theological ideas of the past couple of centuries, its narrator seeks to work through the legacy of his past by opening himself to the unknown and perhaps to the eternal. Life, Holm Jensen shows in his poised, lapidary prose, is best experienced as a gift, but one that must be received in the right way – by living and thinking beside the thought of luminaries old and new. This is a wisdom book, hushed and intimate, that will repay close contemplation.’
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Heidegger:
We do not understand philosophy as
1. a cultural phenomenon, a realm of man’s creativity and the works that issue from it
2. a kind of unfolding of individual personalities as spiritual creators
3. a region of learning and teaching within a system of scientific values; a science
4. a worldview, completion, rounding off, and model of thought; also not as
5. philosophy of existence;
but as a questioning which in a fundamental way changes Dasein, human beings, and the understanding of being.
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe’s wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word—ecstasy. An old artist wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. “I wanted to paint her,” he wrote, “if I denied myself any of the pain I could not believe in my own ecstasy.” We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never be a portion of our being, “Soon got, soon gone,” as the proverb says. I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.
The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.
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Notes from a Room 