About us
Here at humble SADHO, we follow a simple, simple-minded, and simpletonian motto:
- The whole sense of SADHO might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about, we must not expound in long, boring, irrelevant, and unhelpful biographical asides, full of inferential cheating and semantic lying, all packaged in the slime of pretended knowingness.
This is our Regulative Ideal!
Our hearts have been torn from us by robot claws mounted on long lazy tongs extending from the CMB. They rip our hearts out and then retract! Thus our hearts go flying out before us, pulled backward by the receding lazy tongs into the CMB, which is, for us, the spiritual body of SADHO’s twin-god, CLARITYBREVITY.
This founding myth is necessary because ordinary prose cannot adequately express how intensely we dislike bad explanations of interesting things.
What We Actually Do
SADHO is a curiosity-driven philosophy Meetup—with a critical-theoretical interest in our automatic and shared ways of worldmaking.
What is our method? We follow the timeless wisdom of the designers of The Village:
- Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.
- A still tongue makes a happy life.
When do we follow this method? On opposite day—that is, never. Actually we are dedicated to violating both with great vehemence, just like Number You-Know-Who.
SADHO meetings normally combine three things:
- A superb audiovisual exposition of some major philosophical, scientific, historical, artistic, or political problem;
- A serious but convivial discussion of it; and
- A philosophy professor, PhD, other Guest Expert.
SADHO makes scholarship fun by serving up the greatest embodied minds of all time in bite-sized, Technicolor, beautifully arranged morsels, and by bringing bona fide experts to the table for special lectures and Q&A.
In a word, SADHO is a fun, friendly, frolicsome, fleet-footed, (non-)free-form* forum for philosophizing, fostering fellowship alongside and under the tutelage of (sometimes) famous professional and practicing philosophers.
SADHO’s First Promise
- SADHO’s First Promise — Our excursions and tangents will never stray outside the event’s topical Kuiper Belt.
Unlike other philosophy Meetup groups, whose discussions drift all over the Solar System, our high-quality discussions remain firmly within the Kuiper Belt. That’s our promise to you.
Sound impossible? It’s not. The reason is that SADHO Meetups are … not actually free-form. They are anchored and constrained by a force.
A great force.
A force more powerful than even Vader …
The all-conquering force of radical insight, expressed vividly and clearly, by a master teacher.
There is nothing better than an illuminating and meticulously lucid discourse delivered by a riveting and intensely expressive person. Add to this a great video, diagram, or model, and you have the makings of peak experience.
This force flows neither from Scott & Dave, nor from the great topics we choose, but from the the expository virtuosos that elucidate these topics—i.e., from our Guest Experts and the BBC2 Four.
SADHO’s Second Promise
- SADHO’s Second Promise — Our meetings will always include either a qualified Guest Expert or a member of the BBC2 Four.
If SADHO worships anything, it’s clear speaking. That’s it. That’s the big overarching theme and First Principle that drives all our decision making. Consequently, we spotlight the crème de la crème of English-speaking educators and dive into skillfully (or manically) curated discussions, underpinned by top-tier production values and rigorous preparation. Said educators include both (a) living professional philosophers and (b) those pedagogical giants known as the “BBC2 Four.”
SADHO’s Guest Experts
Our Guest Experts are top professors from the North Americas. So far, we have hosted the likes of:
The BBC2 Four
SADHO meetings also (and almost always) revolve around recorded performances by the greatest scientific, historical, and philosophical exegetes of all time. While incarnated on the Prime Material plane, these lofty ones were known as Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Kenneth Clark, and Bryan Magee. These pedagogical saints, these BBC2 Four (aka the British Broadcasting Bards, the Philosophical Fab Four, the BBC-M, etc.) will be our guides.
Here they are again in list view:
What can one say about the BBC2 Four that hasn't already been said? Their work is so widely acclaimed and thoroughly appreciated that finding new words of praise feels like an almost impossible task. I feel compelled to return to Shakespeare, who took great pains to describe the BBC2 Four in that memorable passage from Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 45–65 (as interpreted by Dave Thomas):
“These engrossing masters of elegant exposition; these dexterous wordsmiths of rhetorical Fabergé eggs; these benevolent ministers of restorative mind-tonics; these tireless disciples of skillful means; these master-architects of felicitous visual models, diagrams, and schemas; these altruistic wielders of knot-cutting logicks; these humble and plain-speaking sweepers of cobwebs; these irreverent deflators of metaphysical extravagance; these fortresses of excellence, built by Oxford for England against intellectual infection; these view-transforming founts of illuminating metaphor; these poetic alchemists of feeling and idea; these massively multi-channel pedagogical improvisors; these fascinating bards of scientific and philosophical history; this happy breed of men; this little world; this precious stone set in the TV-static sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier programmes; this nurse; this teaming womb of royal elocutionists, feared by their breed and famous by their birth, renownèd for their deeds as far from home; this blessèd plot, this earth, THIS REALM, THIS BBC2 FOUR!!!”
Even when exalted by the Sweet Swan of Avon himself, mere words seem insufficient to capture the full essence of the BBC2 Four. Now, with the sad passing of three of its luminaries, we realize the depth of our loss. It is, indeed, the second-greatest blessing to humanity that they devoted their talents to the world through BBC2 in the 70s, leaving us with a treasure trove of audiovisual records of their magnificent performances.
Surely, it is these performances, and not the writings of LRH, that should have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules beneath Trementina Base.
Join Us
You can join us …
- Here, on Meetup.
- By wandering around our massively overproduced Notion page, here.
- By lurking around our embryonic YouTube channel. Video for our events will be uploaded here (if possible) as will videos of our events (eventually, some day, once Dave has finished composing our new theme music).
Thank-Yous
Special Thanks to Ingrid Kronenberg for the clean and readable event posters and to Mark Bernstein-Anderson for the nicely toggled-tucked interactive transcripts that let you literally unfold your way to understanding.
SADHO is organized and managed by David Sternman, with financial support provided by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, under SADHO COB Professor Steven Taubeneck.
Upcoming events
5
Modernism Ep07 ⟩ “Culture as Nature”
·OnlineOnlineCulture as Nature: When Capital Becomes the Environment
This week Hughes turns from the artist formerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: cities, commodities, advertising, television, celebrity, electronic noise, shopping malls.
Yeah, yeah—human beings have always lived inside culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hours ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian Deep Time when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language, tools, institutions, and signs—has there been.”
What changes under “late” capitalism is the scale and character of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industrially produced, endlessly reproduced, commercially administered, and finally dense enough to confront us as a kind of second nature. So that’s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things, but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising], the perceptual tongs that grok it, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the MIND industry.
Art now competes with signs engineered to seize the eye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: “Pictures educate; signs discipline.” Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis survives.
Pop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garbage and starting eating it: Rauschenberg’s junk and image-glut, Johns’s flags and targets, Warhol’s repetition and celebrity, Lichtenstein’s comics, Rosenquist’s billboards, Oldenburg’s swollen consumer objects. In music, back in the 80s, this was called “sampling”; today it’s called “composing.”
Anyway, all your favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check this out —
Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet, for instance. But when Monet painted his haystacks and lily- ponds, his specific aim was to show, in the most resplendent detail of nuances, that phenomena are not standardized. His “repetitions” were done to glorify the eye, to show how it could discern tiny differences, and how these differences added up to a continuous alteration of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today, we have sameness within glut, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the difference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteenth century, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.
And speaking of Warhol, check out this piece of crap that sold for $71 million at Christie’s. Can you see the $71 million in it? If not, you have vision problems. Price is, after all, our civilization’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.
Then, because he took a sociology class once, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us to experience the world as montage: war → toothpaste → celebrity → catastrophe → game show. One of the old avant-garde dreams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage, simultaneity, collision, discontinuity.
Unfortunately, capital owns the montage machine and the machine runs under a certain imperative—i.e., M—C—M′.
Very sadly, Robert Hughes died before the really funny part, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the mediation is no longer merely in the air, like culture and space, but in the thing. The world reaches us today already converted into information: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the crappy Apple Maps, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires, wars, hurricanes, friends, presidents, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto the same glowing rectangle, which now rests permanently in front of our eyes.
So Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature, and then also put a screen in front of it, and then also trained the cognizer that interprets it.
By the end of this, the best art history episode of all time, Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the message.” Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still judge; questions of taste, truth, choice, and moral responsibility for images remain unavoidable. Pop, in his account, helped strip art of its claims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dominant image-making power. And so …
The avant-garde died when art ceased to control society’s responsibility for images.
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
26 attendees
Modernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernización
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
11 attendeesModernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernization
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
9 attendeesModernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Modernization.
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
[TBP]
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)
ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK
Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.
View all of our coming episodes here.
13 attendees
Past events
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