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
7
Modernism Ep05 ⟩ “The Threshold of Liberty”
·OnlineOnlineWhat is Modernism?
The Threshold of Liberty: Surrealism and the Haunted Space of the SelfThis episode is so good that I have come out the opposite side of infinity and no longer wish to persuade anyone to attend. In fact, I hope nobody comes. Avoid the most inspiring forty-eight minutes Robert Hughes ever made, because inspiration here comes by way of bona fide demonic possession.
Especially avoid this episode it if you worship the dream-spaces of Mario Bava and Dario Argento: the artificial skies, impossible corridors, saturated colors, theatrical ruins, and malign geometries of Lisa and the Devil, Black Sabbath, Suspiria, and Inferno. Avoid it if you were formed by the folk-occult dread of Tigon, Amicus, Hammer, the BBC, and American occult television—Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, all those BBC witchcraft documentaries, Midnight Offerings, the Shatner-Borgnine masterpiece The Devil’s Rain, Evilspeak (the most accurate Lacanian depiction of the Christian revelation ever made), Umberto Ecco’s occult novels, and most of all Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Friends, there is a stratum of recently antique horror that wounds more deeply than monsters do. Its talisman is the bottomless spider-bite smile of Anthony James as the silent chauffeur in Burnt Offerings—the face of two generations ago that only now admits what it is. Daddy’s boot has been in your face all this time.
This week’s episode gives us the art-historical genealogy of that seductive horrific smile.
It’s the Surrealism Episode!
Hughes’s subject is Surrealism, the 20-cent’s most sustained attempt to free human life from logic, morality, usefulness, and the police supervision of the conscious ego. Its leader, André Breton, was Pope and the world-historical Zeitgeist Magus that Crowley only dreamed of being. Surrealism had dogmas, saints, rituals, baptisms, heresies, expulsions, sacred places, holy objects, and an invisible kingdom whose entrance lay somewhere beneath waking consciousness.
No one attending a Meetup disagrees with the occult metaphysics of Surrealism, which is “the conscious self is late, flimsy, and mostly decorative.” All philosophy readers hanker to insight behind the curtain, under the skin. We all know the truth: our innards are run by dream, desire, repression, memory, coincidence, sexual terror, inherited image, collective fantasy, and the Demon King who thinks us before we arise and pretend to be auto-nomous.
The Most Fun Art
Dream is insight; the pure form of the dream, deepest insight. Madness is evidence. Possession is revelation. Automatic writing, free association, found objects, Tarot, Rorschach blots, chance encounters, trance states, collage, and visual metamorphosis yield core samples from the unconscious, aka the True Self.
And when the occult tries to become real—when it tries to acquire an objective world instead of remaining a private belief—it produces Giorgio de Chirico’s space.
His paintings give the unconscious its perfect expression: immense plazas, hard skies, deep arcades, impossible perspectives, tiny human figures, statues, mannequins, towers, railway smoke, and shadows arriving from objects outside the frame. Everything is geometrically lucid. The perspective is didactically Apollonian. De Chirico is onto-industrial style—the exposed timber framing behind a theatrical flat, the stage-set support structure of reality. It is physical space qua metaphysical evidence.
And yet the scene has been abandoned by ordinary causality-grade reality.
That’s it! De Chirico the true father of all contemporary-pomo understanding of the optimal use-value of art.
Here is our central puzzle:
Why does psychic depth appear as external space?
Why does the supposedly interior unconscious arrive as plaza, desert, horizon, corridor, tower, empty sky, or infinite perspective grid? Why do Dalí’s beaches and de Chirico’s piazzas feel more inward than a face? Why does the dark underbelly of the self become spatial—and why does that space look almost exactly like the clear, public, Apollonian world of ordinary perception, except that it is haunted?
Hughes follows this problem through an extraordinary succession of artists and objects:
Böcklin’s islands of death; Max Ernst’s collage-terrorism; Henri Rousseau’s impossible jungles; Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal; Miró’s polymorphous bestiary; Gaudí’s liquefied architecture; Dalí’s poisoned miniatures; Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup; Man Ray’s mutilated household objects; Magritte’s warfare between word, image, and thing; Bellmer’s violated dolls; Cornell’s sealed memory-theatres; Gorky’s biomorphic landscapes; and the early Abstract Expressionists’ attempt to paint the “tragic and timeless.”
Nature barely matters to the Surrealists. Their jungle is culture: arcades, wax museums, advertisements, shop windows, discarded photographs, mannequins, broken machines, cheap souvenirs, erotic commodities, and the Paris Flea Market—Hughes’s magnificent “unconscious mind of Capitalism itself,” where the commodity world deposits everything it has rejected, forgotten, or failed to sell.
Other Stuff After Surrealism
Hughes crosses the Atlantic and shows us Joseph Cornell turning cultural debris into private cosmologies. Arshile Gorky converting anatomy, landscape, memory, and trauma into fluent biomorphic space. Behold Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell inheriting psychic automatism, stripping away Surrealism’s theatrical dream-images, and using chance itself (anti-causality, anti-robot) as a “plastic weapon” for inventing form.
Free at last! On acid; in twilight/hypnogogic consciousness; the infant brain with every neuron connected to every other is most intimate with bottommost reality.
After 1945, the old dream of liberation mutates again. It passes through Art Brut, happenings, Christo, Chris Burden, body art, psychedelic self-expression, May 1968, Vietnam, the cult of youth, and the belief that exposing the self automatically produces truth.
Hughes then ends this question: Is all confession inherently interesting?
Or does private discharge become art only when it acquires form, structure, discrimination, and intelligible pressure? The Surrealist liberation of the unconscious produced masterpieces. It also produced the still-popular psychic laundry lists, therapeutic pap, documented gesture suites, cultivated derangement performances, and every bourgeois child demanding that his hallucinations receive institutional funding. Hughes is great here.
Bonus Practical Gift
For your immense entertainment value, we will descend the self-hypnotic stairway by means of Ouija boards, Tarot cards, Rorschachs, automatic writing, automatic drawing. We have at least two human guinea pigs willing to conduct low-budget traffic with the Dark Flows … live during the event! If you’ve never witnesses actual channeling before, you’re gonna love this.
All the paintings covered in the episode are collected here: The mighty painting PDF
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
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.
7 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.
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 attendees
Past events
159
