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 is our founding myth because it is the only one strong enough to explain how we feel about clarity and brevity when talking about hard things.
What things are those? 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.
Actual Method
- We present audiovisual surveys of Western philosophy and of the history and philosophy of science—surveys that are masterpieces of illuminating exposition—performed by the “BBC2 Four” (Bronowski, Burke, Clark, and Magee) and
- discuss them, with
- a philosophy PhD, philosophy professor, or 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
6
Modernism Ep06 ⟩ “The View from the Edge”
·OnlineOnlineWhat Is Modernism?
Expressionism and the Invasion of the World by the SelfThe Amazing Thing That Happened Last Time
After employing Dalí’s great paranoiac-critical method on a few Rorschach cards, we performed an exorcism—for a few people who worried that being expressive channels for the Wyrm of the Underdark (the “demon” we chose to invoke during the Dalí segment) “wasn’t generally helpful.” (Oh, thanks again to Jason, the young Jesuit psychiatrist [MD+PhD] who joined us from Georgetown, for reading the rites. Unbelievable stuff, and it took less than seven minutes, just like he said.)
The most interesting part of the evening was the conversation during our freie Aussprache segment: we all marveled at the fact that all three exorcizands complained that being “brought back” made things worse!
Then we talked about Buddhist no-self versus Crowley’s True Will versus Nietzschean self-creation—and about occultism, Surrealism, and depth psychology as rival methods for reading the subjective stuff out of which the fully baked self of the NOW gets continuously manufactured, peels off, and is replaced by the next membrane vomited up by …
By the thing that is either No-Self, True Will, Random Crap, or Infra-Physical Subjective Energy, which is our core (no-)self.
Then we talked about easy ways to hear your demon out:
- Scientology Solo-NOTs. After whatever astonishing expenditure is required to reach the upper levels, you can sit by yourself putting your Body Thetans on the couch, taking their ontological military ID—What are you? Who are you?—until they realize that they are themselves rather than you, your spleen, “fear,” the Navy, or whatever else they have mistaken themselves for, at which point they “blow.” Here’s the actual text.
- Tarot cards.
- The I Ching.
- Automatic writing—as with the automatic-writing sessions of George Yeats, from which W. B. Yeats developed A Vision.
- Automatic-communication aids, like the Ouija board.
- Psychedelics, as a modern way of trying to get beneath conditioning and the socially manufactured personality to something more primordial. That project has obvious affinities—without being identical to them—with the Indian ontological psychologies of Vedānta and Kashmir Śaivism. Except they don’t use cheesy language. They use pre-Socratic-grade metaphors and, at their best, conceptual machinery complicated enough to make Hegel happy. Buddhist analyses of the production of the self, meanwhile, have extraordinary affinities with Hume and, in a very different way, Kant—although Buddhism got there a couple of millennia first.
- And finally we talked about using ART.
Then we saw five minutes of the greatest documentary ever made—A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí, that miracle narrated by Orson Welles. Here’s the link!
Dalí is Literally the Overman
All were delighted and shocked at the greatness of Dalí and realized that he was playing us, but in a spirit of love, because what else is there to do when you are Enlightened, as he is?
If you read Nietzsche and Sartre and conclude that meaning and value are made rather than discovered ready-made in the furniture of the universe, then … nothing changes. You still feel like crap.
What if you acted that insight instead of understanding it as a lonely, thinkable, empty fantasy? You don’t even try to play it out in your head. When you read Foucault and realize that categories like “the mad” are not simply natural quiddities waiting around for us to discover them, but are historically produced ways of carving up and governing human beings, you don’t even run a SimCity scenario and do real speculative fiction.
Thinking through how it might play out in a possible world is already something. But actually being one of those people who knows that what others are, what you are, and what things mean is shot through with convention, history, construction, interpretation, and projection makes life into a joke—but also an opportunity for performance.
What the hell else is there if essence is gone?
The story, metaphor, lens, attitude, theme, upshot, substance—all that non-empirical stuff comes partly from you.
When you say that, you’re closest to Nietzsche and Sartre. When you add that even the categories through which selves become intelligible are historically produced, Foucault joins the party.
So in the end, for the first time in SADHO history, we agreed about something! It was that Dalí was, in fact, fully Enlightened and lived it—and that seeing it pisses us off because we are resentful. That was the climax for me.
When you really act the existentialist wager—when you’re as free as Diogenes, but you also have good taste, are a genius, see into the Underdark, capture the spirit of dreaming and lucid dreaming, and can visualize hyperspatial facts—then perhaps you love people so much that you decide to serve them as a jester.
Dalí is that Awakened One, and he was right here, in the same spacetime we’re in now. This is probably the closest thing to a Dharmic Relic that actually exists, if anything can count as an apt portrayal of a fully realized human being, it is this “video” that is actually a Eucharist—in fact the only properly Eucharist in the universe.
Thanks to the Divine Dalí, we know what the anti-essence “human” looks and sounds like: self-conscious insight into world-making; construction-penetrating wisdom propelled by penetrative love; full experiential acquaintance with the secret substance of meaning and value—until, when you look all the way down, you see the back of your own head.
Substance is chosen, or created, and the aim of the game is to play excellently and entertain the inmates by means of free performative self-invention.
I have uploaded what is now the highest-definition version I know of of this life-changing sound-and-light miracle, with improved audio. This one comes from the Duke A/V Library laserdisc! The other versions I found also use the wrong aspect ratio and crop the image.
So that was last time—which was Surrealism, occultism, Freud, and methods for getting the Underdark to talk.
But this time the topic is, in a sense:
SURREALISM, OCCULTISM, AND FREUD: GOING DEEPER.
The only difference is that this time, instead of trying to make the buried thing speak, we ask what happens when the buried thing seizes the picture.
That is Hughes’s subject in Episode 6, “The View from the Edge.”
He begins with the Romantic problem of the relation between world and spirit. In the nineteenth century, nature could still appear as the visible handwriting of something metaphysically deeper. But once God begins disappearing from the picture, somebody has to take over the job of supplying the world with interiority.
First: van Gogh. Van Gogh is Hughes’s bridge-person between Romanticism and Expressionism. The landscape is no longer something you simply look at. Trees twist, stars convulse, hills clench, sunlight judges. Nature becomes the exterior nervous system of the person painting it.
Next: Edvard Munch, where the process goes completely off the rails in the best possible way. With Munch, Hughes says, the self is finally out. The world no longer guarantees meaning; the wounded ego floods the resulting vacuum. Sex, family, illness, cities, women, crowds, nature itself—everything becomes a screen on which anxiety writes.
And from there: Kirchner, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Soutine—German and northern Expressionism turning nervousness, metropolitan alienation, sex, war, mutilation, hunger, and historical catastrophe into pictorial form.
Then Hughes reaches an extraordinary problem.
After Auschwitz, what happens when reality itself has become more grotesque than Expressionist distortion? When actual human bodies have been industrially degraded on a scale that painted mutilation can hardly answer without seeming almost decorative?
That crisis helps explain the chapter’s great second movement: away from the tortured figure and toward transcendence through abstraction.
So we get Kandinsky, trying literally to see spirit behind matter; Klee, making little cosmologies, botanical heavens, diagrams of invisible order; and Brancusi, making eggs, birds, stones, and polished surfaces look as though matter itself has finally remembered the law according to which it exists.
And then America gets hold of the problem.
The European Expressionist interior collides with the old American sublime—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, prairie, sky, distance, Whitman’s gigantic unbounded Something—and produces Abstract Expressionism.
So: Georgia O’Keeffe. Jackson Pollock. Robert Motherwell. Clyfford Still. Barnett Newman. Mark Rothko.
Pollock turns the canvas into an atmospheric event with no privileged center. Still turns color into cliffs and fissures. Newman reduces the sublime almost absurdly to a giant field and a line. Rothko turns painting into something halfway between landscape, theatre, altar, weather, and glowing metaphysical wound.
And Hughes ends in the Rothko Chapel, where virtually everything has finally disappeared: object, figure, narrative, landscape, almost even color.
Romanticism began by looking at mountains and asking whether God was in there.
It ends in a dark room in Houston staring at an almost-black rectangle and asking whether anything is in there at all.
Which, after last week, seems exactly where we needed to go.
Now it’s time for bed. I spent eight hours writing a summary for the THORR page. Maybe read that. It’s probably clearer.
METHOD
- Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
- Watch this Orson Welles interview of Dalí. It will destroy you! 10 years of therapy in 50 minutes! No kidding!
- 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.
10 attendees
Modernism; 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.
6 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.
5 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.
5 attendees
Past events
160
