a cruel year
this was a cruel year: an osminka of rye cost a grivna, bread cost two nogatas, and honey ten kunas a pood; the people ate lime leaves, birchbark; they ground wood pulp and mixed it with husks and straw; and some ate buttercups, moss, and horseflesh.
— the novgorod first chronicle (1016-1471)
the inimitable justin e. h. smith's year in review.
and this from his most popular post of the year, what are the humanities? :
One of the great lacunae of early modern European philosophy is that it generally left out the second-person experience. Descartes razed the foundations of his knowledge, and then by a process of methodological skepticism was able to reestablish, in succession, his own existence, then the existence of God, then the external world. Early in the 1641 Meditations he had mentioned a “man” in a hat and cloak whom he thought he saw in the street from his window, who was also eliminated in the process of radical doubt, but whose existence, unlike that of God, the world, etc., was never reestablished. Descartes left his fellow man out in the street!
This sort of oversight positioned subsequent modern philosophy for the most part with an overwhelming focus on I-It relations, on how we know the world exists and how we access truths about the world. And it was only much later on, with the rise of phenomenology at the end of the nineteenth century, that philosophers began to appreciate how deeply different the experience of, say, being in a room with another person is from being in that same room with a couch or a pile of sawdust.
This difference was in various ways held to be revelatory of our ontological predicament as human beings. Not just Buber, but also Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, made their careers out of analysing this revelation. Sartre made much of the experience of peeping through a keyhole at a pair of lovers and realising he is being peeped at from behind in turn, and similar kinky scenarios. This all looks like the delirious phantasms of a very different cultural moment, but Sartre is getting at something deeply important here: voyeurism is a crime and a transgression; looking into someone’s house to check out their furniture is of an altogether different character, and this difference tells us something about our place in the order of reality.