If there's one thing Goldberg knows with every fiber of his being, it's the birth of self-consciousness in the struggle to the death.
Struggle to the death R Jonah.
Kudos for "Hitlerian elitism." It's about as good as "Kantian nihilism."
Mixed feelings about this. Sure, he's going to make a hash of it, and his idea of it will be both canned and in danger of leaving the impression in his readers' minds that he's explained what's in it for them.
But I'm for disinhibition, and walking right up to monuments and touching them. When it comes to the big books, I've always benefited from an approach that could be called "just do it."
Hegel -- because he is impenetrable, somewhat pompous, and mystical -- seems to suffer from godawful interpreters more than most. Popper, e.g. Too bad. Anyone here know if Neuhouser's book on the Philosophy of Right is any good?
"Is there any recognition that it's embarrassing for a non-expert to even announce such an intention, let alone to try to sell the results? Is it just can-do Americanism and egalitarianism that thinks someone can pick up a book by a world-historical genius, and, without knowing the language it was written in nor the many works to which it's responding, meaningfully expound on what it's up to, or, as is implied, where it goes wrong? Surely I'm expressing Hitlerian elitism by mocking the project."
So, you are not going to post about sex anymore?
One of my friends, complaining about a pretentious grad student in one of her classes: "Don't tell me you understood Hegel better. Asserting that just proves you're an idiot."
I'm sure that Jonah is closely studying the Hegel scholarship of, e.g., Charles Taylor and Allen Wood as we speak. Or his intern is, anyway.
Popper came to my mind, too. I'm also always amused by the really bitter complaints one sees at times from Plato and Hegel scholars regarding the various rather creative interpretations of the two offer by Hannah Arendt. Like she would have cared. I'm surprised more Kantians don't do the same, though I suppose most of her stuff on him is in her less read books.
You're right. Kant suffers pretty terribly from this too. Utilitarians are such douchebags.
presumably this means that we're going to be treated to Jonah's reading of Hegel
I guaran-damn-tee you that we will in fact be treated to Goldberg's reading of somebody else's reading of Hegel. Karl Popper's or Bertrand Russell's, I suspect. There's bound to be a well-worn copy of Russell's History of Philosophy on Goldberg's desk, heavily underlined.
meh. I will sometimes idly make up little theories of moral philosophy and constitutional interpretation even though I'm grossly unqualified to do so. No one's giving me book contracts for it, & if they did I'd do my homework, but I dislike the idea that it's never an amateur's place to contradict an expert...it was not prevalent in the 19th century, and it closes off an awful lot, particularly when experts simply do NOT make an effort to write about things in clear & accessible language even in fields where they could. (I recognize that it's often impossible).
I also disagree that deference to experts prevents the idea that "everything is ideology, with no facts that aren't in political play, and no unbiased experts on any topic." If amateurs are completely unqualified to evaluate the arguments in experts, then all you need are a couple of hack 'experts'--obvious examples: John Yoo and David Addington-- to reduce the debate to "the experts disagree & who am I to contradict them".
There's a place for smart amateurs or specialists in other fields who try to seriously engage the experts. Goldberg just isn't one.
3: I'm kind of with IDP. While I'd assume Goldberg's reading of There's A Monster At The End Of This Book! would be embarrassingly nitwitted, there's something peculiar about a claim that it's presumptuous for an intelligent and educated, but non-expert, reader to offer a reading of a work of this importance. Saying that it's unlikely to be new, or interesting as a matter of Hegel scholarship, sure. But saying that (a) Hegel has something important to say about society but (b) a non-expert talking about how Hegel affected people's thinking about society will inevitably be grotesquely misguided seems wrong.
(I, myself, don't know jack about Hegel.)
But funnily enough, douchebags are extremely utilitarian.
I'm all for people reading the great books and discussing them, preferably with people who are, in fact, experts. And there are some authors that an intelligent amateur can read by himself and profit from: Locke, for example. Maybe even Hume. Hegel is not one of these authors.
Hasn't the real work, showing that stance and image are everything, been done already by television? Book-shaped objects which contain a talk-show monologue thrive, their relevance determined by their tawdriness. I expect that they'll multiply, their spawn taking over the public schools and imposing unreasonably on emergency rooms. Books written by thoughtful people that require attention from their readers may have a niche existence, but in the noosphere as in nature, fecundity trumps longevity.
I doubt Hegel will feature very prominently in the book anyway; it's not as if he's cited in daily discourse as the godfather of modern liberalism. He probably gets no more than two sentences. The switch to "Hegel to Whole Foods" was clearly about having a good-sounding subtitle, not about getting closer to the real heart of the argument.
(Also: Is it just the novelty of the blogosphere to me that makes me think that the left's Jonah Goldberg obsession is a little cruel?)
I'd argue that the serious amateur can probably make a good go at reading and commenting on just about anything. However, the amount of ancillary reading that may be required to be 'serious' does vary a lot from author to author and subject to subject.
Hume, definitely, could be approached quite easily. Hegel, I really have no idea.
And there are some authors that an intelligent amateur can read by himself and profit from: Locke, for example. Maybe even Hume. Hegel is not one of these authors.
Okay, I really don't know anything about Hegel, or what effect Hegel has had on philosophical/political thought. But presumably he's had some such effect, or he wouldn't be important. And surely an intelligent amateur could, rather than reading Hegel in a vaccuum, read along with Hegel, e.g., commentaries on Hegel, other writers relying on Hegel, and so forth, and intelligently discuss the consequences of thoughts influenced by Hegel as they've emerged from the academy.
Goldberg isn't purporting to turn out a work of Hegel scholarship; he's purporting to describe an unfortunate strain in liberal ideology as it has been put into practice that he traces back to Hegel. Given that this is Goldberg, it's going to be pernicious bullshit, but I don't think the inaccessible stature of Hegel is what makes it pernicious bullshit.
Is there any recognition that it's embarrassing for a non-expert to even announce such an intention, let alone to try to sell the results?
The proof of expertise is in the doing, no? Otherwise we get pure credentialism and the BS that goes with that. That said, I haven't read anything by J.G. that would cause me to take this effort seriously.
Even if Goldberg's reading of Hegel is very wrong, I presume there will remain some kind of argument that should be judged on its merits. Even if the argument is about Hegel's influence, say "The Rational is The Real" (whatever, read Kaufmann's "Hegel" 30 years ago) as pernicious, the argument is not directly diminished by the misreading. "Is Rational=Real a widespread ideology, and is it pernicious" and needs no authority.
My understanding of "scholars" and the "reality-based community" is that they will discard an entire work with prejudice based on a wrong date or mispelled citation. Ideas & opinions are not reducible or even correlated to any set of facts, and most of the standards used in academia are pure & simple credentialism without relevance or foundation.
How many books about Hegel need be studied before you are allowed to express a opinion? 50? 500? Bernard Lewis does demonstrate the irrelevance of knowledge.
Goldberg will probably have a paragraph or two to the effect that Hegel said the state was the embodiment and culmination of the historical world-spirit and isn't it just like a typical liberal to think the state is all that.
A couple of clarifications: Hegel really is something of a special case--you remember the Being and Time reading group, LB--Heidegger is crystal fucking clear compared to Hegel. And if someone is going to read a lot of secondary sources with care and attention, then absolutely, they can get a lot out of any book. I was envisioning Goldberg sitting down with the Hegel and immediately pounding out a chapter.
I think the subtitle was probably chosen for the way it sounded, not because Jonah has much to say about Hegel. In fact, they were going to have it be Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Schopenauer to Chardonnay, but then somebody decided Chardonnay wasn't all that liberal.
From Rimbaud to Ratatoille.
Was there something wrong with the privileging of science? I think that's something we should all get behind. Not just because I'm a scientist, or anything. Remember, we're objective, so clearly I've got good reasons- this comment box is too small to contain them, though.
And this would work especially well now that there is an animation coming out under that title from hard left-wing Pixar, or Disney, or whoever it is.
23: Heh. Being and Time is I think the only book I can recall not finishing because it was too much work. I read some more than we got through in the reading group, but entirely failed to comprehend it.
The other thing he'll probably say is that Hegel was a big influence on Marx, and we all know how that turned out. So yeah, it'll be Hegel as the font of all state-worship, as manifested in Marxian totalitarianism, German fascism, the Democratic party, and contemporary American organic food grocery stores.
entirely failed to comprehend it
Did it work as poetry?
Dude, Goldberg puts out blegs for background information on comic strips (made-up example). The idea that he's interested in being a "serious amateur" is absurd on its face.
It may be part of Ogged's position that no/few amateurs will have anything interesting to say on Hegel because of his impenetrability, but the critical fact here is that the single laziest pundit that this country has ever produced is going to pretend to have something worthwhile to say about a sophisticated thinker who was a difficult writer.
"Blind man analyzing the composition of Cubist paintings" comes to mind.
re: 30
I took a course on 'existentialism'* as an undergraduate. I found most of the material on the course really quite accessible but the Heidegger ... not so much. So I am with you.
* loosely conceived and broadly defined.
32: Nope. Remember that my initial reaction to it was that 'being' stopped being a word and became a sound effect? That just happened to more and more words. Eventually I stopped reading because I couldn't take the racket.
28:Just looked up "The Rational is the Real" and found Engels mocking Hegel. Could be a misreading of Hegel, of course.
Whatever. That is the basis of my opposition to Hegel, the reason I follow two branches of the anti-Hegelians...Marx and Kierkeggaard/Nietzsche...and the source of my discontent with the 19th century paradigm that still rules us, whether thru economics or scientism. People talk about Modernism and Post-modernism, and then claim privilege via a reality-based community, facts, evidence, arguments. And then bomb Fallujah, or whine about the unreason of it.
No, reason rules nothing and no one, and never will. This comforting delusion should have died in the ovens at Auschwitz.
32: That LizardBreath! No appreciation for Rowling or Heidegger!
re: 35
Yeah, there are certain philosophers [and this is probably not something I should admit to publicly] that I just find near impossible to read. I find their prose completely impenetrable and simply can't muster the will-power to exert the effort that would be required to actually acquire a decent understanding of what they are saying. Heidegger is one of them. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I tried, I might find it easier now.
It does come down to something like what you are saying re: 'being'. Just an exhaustion with the way that the language is being used.
became a sound effect
Yeah, that's why I was asking about it as poetry. This seems to happen to me pretty inevitably when I try and read philosophy, that I experience the words as sound rather than sign. It can be fun but I agree that a few hundred pages of that is bogus.
21: If Goldberg does the research, and provides an intelligent critique of liberalism based on Hegel, I'd imagine his book would require more than a subtitle change. This isn't credentialism, this is just expecting that if you have an argument that you've done the work.
The reading group actually wasn't totally unsuccessful for the tiny part of B&T it covered -- it just didn't have a critical mass of people with any confidence that they understood what they were reading. With three or four more people that the confused crowd like me could have followed along behind, it might have been productive.
What, B-Wo was not charismatic enough of a leader for you?
Science should be privileged because it has demonstrated utility not because it is inaccessible to the layman (which it isn't). What is philosophy good for?
re: 42
Yeah, reading groups are great. A few years ago, I used to go to a regular student-run reading group in Oxford, working on new papers in the philosophy of mind. It was great, and very very productive. Admittedly, everyone that attended was already pretty well-informed about the field, but on any given paper there'd always be a mixture of people who knew a lot about that particular piece of material and people who knew less.
Just Ogged and B-wo weren't enough to keep a discussion going, and the rest of us were on a "Is it about kitties?" level of understanding.
LB is being modest. She was totally getting it, but we all ran out of steam.
44: Thinking about the boundaries of science. Go read Quine's 2 dogmas of empiricism, it's quick, or if you can stomach him, Feyerabend. Also, having some rational basis for ethical decisions may be useful in the face of fast and cheap biotechnology.
What is philosophy good for?
Inventing science.
44:The human population was fairly stable and not completely uninteresting for its first few thousand years. If science/technology gives us a logarhythmic leap in numbers and affluence at the cost of a Malthusian crash and/or a Huxleyian dystopia I do question its utility.
Population, production, affluence, comfort. Marx & Marxists are the apex of the Enlightenment, and simply seek a universality of fecund lemming-ness with squeak-toys, treadmills, and full tummies.
Ogged is 100% right on "crystal-fucking clear compared to Hegel."
You could *possibly* get an abridged Phenomenology of Spirit that would have the interesting parts without the trumped-up dialectic, but it would still not be beach reading.
47: Charles Taylor makes Hegel about as plausible as can be done for an English-speaking audience, I think. Hyppolite and Kojeve are good continental readings, i.e., not necessarily so much for understanding Hegel -- tho Hyppolite did translate the PhG, and thus has at least read the entire thing once. Yovel has a book-length translation & running commentary on the *Preface* to the PhG that is worth looking at if you want to tackle a smidge of the real thing.
Goldberg is going to do his hegels every day until he can make a hiller argument.
I get actively hostile in the face of philosophical texts I can't begin to understand: if no one can figure out what the hell Hegel's saying how do we know he's so brilliant?
I reject the premise. "Demonstrable utility" is not, and should not be, the defining characteristic of human achievement.
54: The cartoon summary that I've absorbed is that he's a nearly-deterministic rationalist but not a materialist. There are not many like this, and it's interesting to see how far such ideas could be pushed. If you don't enjoy pushing ideas, the brilliance is not relevant; it's an alternative to chess that computers cant win at yet.
47. thanks!
They say that Kojeve is interesting & influential in his own right, but absolutely not good as an interpretation of Hegel.
I've never seen an online reading group that didn't fall apart fairly rapidly. And I've seen a lot of online reading groups.
I can't read Heidegger. Just can't, don't know why. Love reading some of his students--nearly devoted myself to the still-growing Arendt industry back in the day, and I'm always ready for a little tasty Truth and Method but just can't deal with him.
I get actively hostile in the face of philosophical texts I can't begin to understand: if no one can figure out what the hell Hegel's saying how do we know he's so brilliant?
I ask this not in defensive mode but in genuine curiosity: do you get similarly actively hostile in the face of, say, the theory of general relativity? (Or is that not hard enough?)
I apologize if that constitutes an analogy. I believe it does not. I'll fight ya.
59: So, I dropped out of physics before I could say I understood general relativity on anything other than a cartoon level, but it was absolutely clear what I would have to learn to understand it. I didn't understand general relativity like I don't speak German, but there's a clearly defined path to getting there -- master the relevant mathematical tools and bob's your uncle.
Understanding Heidegger seems like an entirely different category of learning, and one that I do sometimes feel like Katherine about.
Is it just the novelty of the blogosphere to me that makes me think that the left's Jonah Goldberg obsession is a little cruel?
It must be noted that the Left can be very cruel.
re: 60
Of course much of philosophy isn't like that. In fact the philosophy that is like that -- impenetrably obtruse -- is atypical at least vis a vis the mainstream of the philosophical tradition over the past 400 years or so.
re: 60
To continue, I am arguably, 'a philosopher'. I'm sort of ABD as far as education goes, I've taught philosophy, I have even published (once). I find Heidegger totally impenetrable. It's not just you.
the mainstream of the philosophical tradition over the past 400 years or so
Ahem. It all depends on your define mainstream, doesn't it, you imperialist? But even on generous terms, I think I'd disagree. Kant is certainly mainstream, even for analytics, isn't he? And is Russell's Principia easy to understand?
52: Not *the* Charles Taylor..
51: Ah, you're the guy Goldberg's talking about. Nice of you to show up.
re: 65
Bah, brain-typo. I meant 'abstruse'.
But I like it. It occupies a space neatly between enough similar words (obscure? obtuse? abstruse?) that it took me thirty seconds of staring to be sure that it didn't mean anything.
The fact that the readability/comprehensibility of philosophers *varies* so much is part of what makes me hostile. And I regard texts written in other languages I'm not proficient in--whether it's German or mathematics (it's not Einstein's fault I forgot all of trig & calculus & never even attempted to take a college math class)--differently from texts that have ostensibly been translated into English. When philosophers use a highly specialized vocabulary they tend to have invented it for one work.
(on the other hand, part of it is sheer pissiness--I don't like feeling stupid & get cranky when I do.)
The Philosophy of Right is a lot easier than the Phenomenology of Spirit, and particularly useful on Hegel's political thought (none of that stuff about the rotations of the planets being the working out of the dialectic of Spirit).
51: a very pithy perspective on the Last Man. If you really feel this way, why are you against stuff like the invasion of Iraq? Perpetual war will help keep us tough and manly as opposed to lemming-like.
re: 69
When philosophers use a highly specialized vocabulary they tend to have invented it for one work.
Again, I think that's unfair and applies more to particular 'genres' of philosophy. Most anglophone philosophy over the past 60 years or so has a fairly widely shared vocabulary.*
* I expect Emerson to appear soon ...
Husserl and Heidegger were where I gave up -- I found them totally incomprehensible. This is as compared to Kant and Hegel, who were a hard slog but I felt I could understand, albeit on the "informed amateur" level.
I reject the premise. "Demonstrable utility" is not, and should not be, the defining characteristic of human achievement.
I don't understand. What is, or should be, the defining characteristic of human achievement if not utility?
re: 74
Yeah, well, not wanting to set up any crude analytic/continental dichotomy or nothin', but ...
The thing is, if enough people ignore someone, that person's not necessary for continuing conversation. So, for example, I've almost never been at professional disadvantage for not knowing anything about Heidegger, whereas I'd be run out of town on a rail if I didn't know anything about Hume. Who I love, by the way.
Kant is sort of at a midpoint here. Here's a fun trick: go to a gathering of ethicists and start pushing a little on their understanding of Kant. Some people will turn out to know an awful lot, and a lot of people will know very little beyond their undergrad lecture material. Someday I would like to make the jump from the latter group to the former.
Kant is sort of at a midpoint here. Here's a fun trick: go to a gathering of ethicists and start pushing a little on their understanding of Kant. Some people will turn out to know an awful lot, and a lot of people will know very little beyond their undergrad lecture material. Someday I would like to make the jump from the latter group to the former.
Ditto.
Not unfair at all. Impenetrability is a time-honored tactic for guardians of truth. Was Aquinas clear? Why was Sejong's invention so unpopular with scholars? Now that
philosophers are largely entertainers or tokens, things have changed some. I suspect that contemporary impenetrability shares something with the likes of Anselm Kiefer.
On the other hand I felt a little less bad when someone slipped me Scanlon's lecture notes on the Groundwork and I saw that I was at least not completely wrong about some stuff. What an awesome feeling of relief that was.
Now that philosophers are largely entertainers or tokens,
??? Nowadays philosophers are largely professors.
I don't really want to get into this, but part of what Heidegger (and Husserl, though I know much less about him) is doing is trying to get away from a lot of previous philosophical language that he thinks introduces all sorts of baggage and assumptions. So he's carefully constructing a vocabulary to describe something in a new way that he hopes will let us go back and see the baggage and assumptions for what they are. So it's going to be difficult, but presumably it's always going to be difficult to try to think about things in new ways. This is why, when reading something like Heidegger, it doesn't really work to sit down with one of his books and try to figure it out for yourself. It matters a lot that you realize that the fact that he never describes Dasein in terms of "consciousness" is deliberate and important, for example.
It matters a lot that you realize that the fact that he never describes Dasein in terms of "consciousness" is deliberate and important, for example.
Aha! It makes no sense at all outside the context of lots of other works, and that is essential to its importance!
re: 80
I reread the Groundwork fairly recently. Part of my doctoral thesis advances a quasi-Kantian view of something or other, so I reread it.* I still found it fairly hard going. I certainly wouldn't like to teach it.
* not that it really matters, I didn't intend the view to be 'Kantian' as such, so whether or not I am a good Kant scholar is irrelevant ...
ttam, a person much smarter and better informed than I am told me that she won't teach it to undergrads any more because it's too hard. I've decided more or less to focus on a couple of big points: the contrast with Hume's anthropological account of moral judgment and obligation, the connection between being rule-governed and moral obligation, and going over the first two formulations in a way that isn't totally dumb. Whether this is a good thing or not is unclear.
I don't understand. What is, or should be, the defining characteristic of human achievement if not utility?
Not demonstrable utility. What's the utility of Michelangelo's David? By the "demonstrable utility" standards of science, not a whole hell of a lot. Utility of fiction? (It's just lies!) Music? Poetry? Fine cuisine? (Why not just eat perfectly calculated protein bars?) Technology that allows us to place games or chat with people we'll never meet? You could probably argue that most of science will never lead to anything demonstrably useful.
But Cala, you say, those things are useful insofar as people find them meaningful or as part of what it means to be human. Exactly. And if we use that definition of utility, then philosophy counts, too.
66, 72: Attacked from the left and the right. Doesn't make me a centrist or prove I am correct or objective, but is what passes for entertainment for a misanthrope and pessimist.
77,78:Picked up Strawson on the 1st Critique this week. When laypeople claim to understand Kant, I would bet it is based on a shallow reading of the 2nd Critique. Or a misreading of the 3rd. I have never encountered many professionals who think the 1st Critique is particularly easy.
But maybe it is just me.
a person much smarter and better informed than I am told me that she won't teach it to undergrads any more because it's too hard.
There's something to be said for that sort of wisdom. I've certainly taught stuff in the past that, with hindsight, I think I didn't really 'get' with the kind of certainty I'd really like.
Was Aquinas clear?
Extraordinarily so. Not easy, but not due to a lack of clarity.
77: I think it's almost fashionable in some circles to think that Kant was just incoherent on a lot of points, so, whatever, teach him in early modern and ignore the rest.
It's hilarious how Aquinas reads like a certain kind of analytic philosopher. "Here is my thesis. Here are some arguments. Next, objections, with replies. Moving on..."
86:Ahhh. The groundlings are for the Uebermenschen! Takes a lot of suffering peasants to fund a suit of armor or chapel fresco. But the "Madonna of the Rocks" makes it all worthwhile.
No it doesn't.
I think it's almost fashionable in some circles to think that Kant was just incoherent on a lot of points
In my dark moments I think that about some other people's work too. That a lot of people are wasting a lot of time analysing the work of X, when there's no 'there' there.
90: I don't know, wouldn't you think that's explained by their being part of the same continuous tradition?
91: Not what I said.
90: Actually, if we're being technical, it's 'here are other people's objections. here is my scripture quote. here is my thesis. here is my argument. here is my response to those objections.' Which leads to lots of undergraduates skimming and saying 'Aquinas thinks that God has a body...'
93: Not really. Mainly I say this because there's a huge historical gap between them, because the early analytics weren't exactly scholars of medieval philosophers, and because my sinuses are killing me.
Cala, you troll-feeder, I stand corrected.
What's sort of amazing is how very different the "great" philosophers' styles are. Aquinas is nothing like even many other medieval philosophers, and they're nothing like, say, Kierkegaard, who is nothing like Heidegger, who is nothing like Quine, and then there's Plato who wrote dialogues, etc.
I can't speak to Hegel but I loooved There's A Monster At The End Of This Book
I kant remember if Hegel plays:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrShK-NVMIU
There's no way we should consider Goldberg a serious amateur. I answered his request (which has been removed from the Corner archives, I should add) for information on Herbert Spencer on a lark, and let me tell you: he wanted someone to find the exact quotes which supported what he thought Spencer said. When I told him that, being somewhat of a Spencer scholar, I couldn't support him in his decision to say Spencer said that, he told me he'd find someone who could and that I needn't write back.
when reading something like Heidegger, it doesn't really work to sit down with one of his books and try to figure it out for yourself.
In other words, yes, he's incomprehensible.
No seriously, I think I vaguely understand that he's trying to break free from previous vocabularies, and you need some outside guide to his conceptual vision to understand him. The reason he's so tantalizing is that even on your own you can occasionally get a kind of opaque glimpse of what his vision entails. But in the end I just couldn't get through to the other side and see it. Perhaps you need to like, take a course, and speak German too. Those two requirements effectively bar him to English speaking non-students like me.
Why is that anonymous President using Acephalous as his URL. The nerve!
82 gets it exactly right, by the way. But you all knew that.
The deal is:
You say: I don't get what you're talking about!
H (in this case, Heidegger) says: Exactly.
The terms are defined to an extent negatively: Dasein is not this, not that, and so on. This is one of the points of neologisms, whether in Heidegger or elsewhere. And yeah, an understanding of the work of past thinkers is astoundingly helpful in seeing what's not being said.
But I'm carrying on. Except, except: understanding Wittgenstein, to the extent that that's possible, calls for a similar grounding and process. He just uses an interlocutor to walk you (or himself) through it.
Is it possible for a non-philosopher to write intelligently about philosophy? Take, for example, Jonah Goldberg on Hegel.....
Nice try, but I call shenanigans. : Take a typical Arab-American, for example Sirhan Sirhan.....
Up to a point, Hegel's role in political thought can be studied independently of his more technical philosophy.
The difficulty of contemporary philosophy is not its sole problem. I personally am motivated by doubts that in my areas of interest (e.g. ethics) the difficulty is justified by any kind of payoff. Few have this kind of doubt about quantum physics or relativity.
Theoretically, the philosophically sophisticated tools of analytic philosophy should have produced superior ethical thought, but you could argue just as well that analytic ethics has done more harm than good.
Barbara Herman should be everyone's first stop for Kant commentary.
Peter Singer has a short introduction to Hegel. Anyone know anything about it, pro or con?
I sat down and tried to read "A Thousand Plateaus" once, and it didn't make a damn bit of sense to me. That's the only experience I've ever had like that; it was extremely frustrating. I've never tried to read Hegel or Heidegger, though. (But I have a copy of "Intro to Metaphysics" on my bookshelf that I keep swearing I'm going to open any day.)
89. ??? Aquinas' clarity on any particular topic sheds no light on his main concerns, which I did not notice his enumerating anywhere; the underlying challenge that I always find most interesting is his attempt to reconile aristotle with scripture, or at least to minimize the scope of the disagreements. He's unclear in the sense that the mouseprint on a DSL agreement is unclear; there's no arguing with the unambiguous sentences, but the goals are kept obscure, since the writer would prefer not to have to defend those.
being somewhat of a Spencer scholar
Something of a Spencer scholar.
You can't correct the President's grammar, ben. He's the President. Don't make him bust out the League of Nations on your ass.
Woodrow might be interested in this; the archives are still there, it seems.
Also, I have read that A was enormously fat, as evidenced by the need to build a special pulpit, but have never found a citation for the fact of this pulpit. Urban legend, anyone know?
When laypeople claim to understand Kant, I would bet it is based on a shallow reading of the 2nd Critique. Or a misreading of the 3rd.
Aside from actual Kant scholars, I don't think anyone reads the 3rd Critique.
Why not? The third critique is great (also plenty of literary types who aren't "actual Kant scholars" if by that phrase you mean someone whose specialty is Kant read it). Even the preface or introduction or whatever is great. What I think no one reads aside from Kant scholars: the second critique.
90: or like any blog with comments enabled.
The third critique is pretty good, but you need to read the first and second to understand it.
86
Philosophy as art? Philosophy as entertainment? Philosophy as luxury?
I always thought philosophy was trying to explain "stuff" and it's utility should be judged on those grounds. Is this correct? Do philosophers see themselves as investigators of the nature of "stuff" (kinda like scientists) or are they more like poets?
What I think no one reads aside from Kant scholars: the second critique.
Really? What are all these Kantian ethicists basing their work on, Groundwork? (I'm asking this in all seriousness. I'm not at all up on contemporary ethics.)
I should note that I am not in the range of the quantifier "no one". (Although I might fall under the "Kant scholar" exception, since I was writing a dissertation on Kant's theory of substance at the time.) I've read the 3rd Critique. Took a whole seminar on it. And I didn't see anything I thought would interest someone who wasn't a Kant scholar.
86
"But Cala, you say, those things are useful insofar as people find them meaningful or as part of what it means to be human. Exactly. And if we use that definition of utility, then philosophy counts, too."
Religious scholars argue fine points of theology. Lots of people find this meaningful but I think it is largely circular nonsense. Is philosophy distinguishable?
86: Lots of people find philosophy meaningful. James B. Shearer thinks it's largely circular nonsense.
In those two respects, philosophy is not distinguishable from theology.
Whether this says more about philosophy, or about James B. Shearer, is an open question.
117 Bertrand Russell thought as you do, as did many pre-enlightenment philosophers, as well as their patrons and readers. Less clear now. Poetry was once serious too, and I am not sure that I like the division of human endeavor into either empiricism or poetry.
114: ben's correct about the Third Critique. It's a staple in introduction to literary theory courses -- excerpted, unless you attend a theory-heavy school with a three quarter-long "introduction" to literary theory.
116:The 2nd critique is pretty good, but you need to read the 1st and 3rd to understand it. I guess if only professionals are reading the 2nd & 3rd, the 1st Critique must be the Amazon blockbuster.
My sophomore ethics reading list:Hume, 2nd Critique, an overview of Utilitarianism, and Sedgewick. A lot of people read the 2nd.
Labs is a meanie.
To be clear, I don't think philosophy is circular nonesense.
117: Honestly, I think that thinking about the sorts of questions that come up in philosophy are just part of what it means to be human. Note the emphasis on the process of thinking, rather than getting an answer. Is it useful? Depends on what you mean by useful. Part of human flourishing, I'd say, but not in the 'we cured cancer!' sense, but it's got good company as even the areas of science that turn out to be demonstrably useful aren't as big as science would hope.
A somewhat unfashionable description of what philosophy is doing, is clarifying the various concepts at play when we use language. That may be unfashionable, but it does at least explain how philosophy can be doing something productive.
120. Is Godel's proof circular nonsense? What is its demonstrable utility?
128
It saved a lot of pedantic mathematicians/computer scientists a lot of hearteache and pain.
More seriously: I think the sort of people who aren't impressed by philosophy likely won't be impressed by number theory either. So your analogy probably doesn't phase Shearer.
I felt my philosophy education was complete after reading Calvin and Hobbes. Then, I got married and completed my philosophy education with some hands on courses in despair and skepticism.
But if it's the process of thinking rather than finding the answer--or even getting closer to the answer over time, which science seems to--the impenetrable nature of the writing is a REAL disincentive.
phase s/b faze.
I guess I just outed myeslf as an engineer.
132: That was obvious many comments ago.
124: Doing an author search at Amazon for Immanuel Kant, it appears that Groundwork is his bestselling book. The 1st Critique is #2, and appears several more times on the list, in different translations.
The 3rd Critique doesn't appear on the list until #8.
The 2nd Critique doesn't appear until #14 by itself, but it is anthologized along with another translation of Groundwork in #4. So it's hard to say whether the 2nd or 3rd Critique is more widely read.
132
Really?! I'd hate to be the kinda guy who seems like an engineer. I hate those guys.
Philosophers I struggle with but get include: Kant, Husserl, Heidegger.
Philosophers I struggle with but don't get include: Hegel.
Seriously, I once spent three months trying to read the Phenomenology of Geist. I diagrammed almost every sentence to try to work it out. Thirty pages into Hegel's introduction, I just gave up.
129 I'm not sure that a spirit of curiosity or conviviality is what brings him here. The Quine essay I cited earlier points out the difficulty in making distinctions between empirical and analytic truth. It's not unknown to mathematicians, even the platonists; full text is online.
128 129
Actually I think Godel's proof is an important result (which is not that hard to understand). Does philosophy have anything similar?
135: Just teasing, but it's not all that uncommon for engineers to insist the only good use of time is theirs, because they Are Demonstrably Useful®, and usually they insist this in between games of Starcraft...
135: Meh. The stuff I work on helps kill people. Demonstrable utility is overrated.
Sadly, the Prolegomena is only #21 on the list. If I had someone ask me what to read to begin to understand Kant, I'd recommend the Prolegomena. I've never had anyone ask me that, mind you.
I did have someone ask me recently for something to read as an introduction to philosophy, and I handed her Russell's Problems of Philosophy.
If it is your thinking that it is an important result that makes it worthwhile, philosophy has something similar in Epictetus, whose writings pleased Marcus Aurelius. You brought up demonstrable utility, not whether someone cared. What empirical result relies on Godel's proof? The Quine essay really is worth reading.
Is there any recognition that it's embarrassing for a non-expert to even announce such an intention, let alone to try to sell the results?
This is silly. Any number of non-experts have had interesting things to say about Hegel. Trilling, for example. Or Fukuyama.
142: You know, as a big fan of Quine, I have to say that I think "Two Dogmas" is seriously overrated. The argument against reductionism is good; but the argument, insofar as there is one, against the analytic/synthetic distinction is underwhelming.
I wonder whether there's a chasm between those who think that "Two Dogmas" was his best essay, and those (like me) who think "On What There Is" is his best.
142
Godel's result is important not because I personally think it is important but because it saves effort by placing limits on what it is possible to achieve.
Michael Vanderwheel, B.A.
We're more interested in the art of bachelors than the Bachelor of Arts.
Shearer, there's a fellow in the other thread, cg, who wants to meet you.
144: I guess it's that the essay is tailor made for those coming to the argument from a position of naive platonism, which many people trying to do useful work in the exact sciences hold. At least I did when I was and read it. There are scores of empirically irrelevant results in math, and it is not some damn application that matters . The tenuous particulars of empirical relevance matter for anyone working with equations. Hardy's _A Mathematicians Apology_ is another prod at the same mindset, though probably uninteresting for a humanities background.
Reading the 3rd Critique in a seminar my last year as an undergrad, along with a healthy dose of other philosophy courses, was some of the best preparation for art history grad school ever, in no small part because not that many other people had read it but all felt like they should have.
We're more interested in the art of bachelors than the Bachelor of Arts.
Who calls it batching? Is that from Little House, The Long Winter?
It was a (lame) joke, Michael Vanderwheel, B.A.
I thought somebody was making light of my achievement.
145. You still haven't demonstrated utility. The radical position would be that the set theorists whose efforts are saved are theologians. If Zermelo had never existed, which differential equation couldn't be solved, which property of elliptical integrals would be unproveable?
I believe set theory is relevant, but I wouldn't rest that belief on its tenuous connection to physics. I'd be a clown if I talked to someone doing such work and told them they were useless before having done basic homework. I suspect you're trolling-- surely you realize that people have written about the very questions you're asking? Both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are well worth reading, by the way.
138: I subscribed to a view of philosophy (I think this was Russell's view as well) that holds that as philosophical sub-disciplines mature, and their methodology becomes more fixed, these disciplines are spun off, and cease to be "philosophy".
In ancient Greece, there was no distinction between philosophy and biology. Only in the seventeenth century was physics spun off as a separate discipline; and only at the turn of the twentieth did psychology spin off.
So we should not be surprised that the problems of philosophy seem intractable, the questions unanswerable. The questions that philosophy is left with are the hard questions. If we had definitive answers for them, they would no longer be considered philosophical questions.
158: "subscribed" should be in the present tense.
The questions that philosophy continues to ask, the un-spun-off ones, are and continue to be damned interesting questions, something that ought to be fairly obvious to anyone with the remotest dose of intellectual curiosity. Someone may argue that the questions are unanswerable, or that philosophy isn't the discipline best placed to answer them, but they still ought to agree that they are interesting and important.
Shearer is trolling.
There are lots and lots of answers to what philosophy is "doing" or what it's good for. In the early analytic days, it was something like clarifying the concepts used in science. For a long while in the medieval period, it was about the nature of reality as it relates to God. Heidegger says somewhere that the task of philosophy is retain the force of the most elemental words. Personal fave John McCumber argues that philosophy is about giving us the language to properly situate ourselves in our world. The list goes on. Part of doing philosophy is asking what doing philosophy is...
Awwwyeah. I'm liking this new pseudonym.
Hmm, I suppose I'd be nattarGcMttaMMABPHIL or something.
Golly, LIHPBAMnattarGcMttaM, can't you spell your own name?
IdontpayBAAMJD ?
Labs' is almost pronounceable.
Sounds like a new medication for fungal infections.
157
"145. You still haven't demonstrated utility. The radical position would be that the set theorists whose efforts are saved are theologians. ..."
Are we talking about about the same Godel result? I am referring to his undecidable result that any sufficiently complex axiomatic system contains propositions that are true but unprovable within the system. This applies for example to ordinary integer arithmetic. This is useful because there were people (Hilbert ?) who were trying to find an automatic procedure to determine whether such propositions were true or false. This would have been useful so proving it is impossible is also useful.
I thought that the sciences were spun off because folks adopted provisionally some metaphysical doctrine (like medieval nominalism for example, which I believe originated as a theodical argument) without having conclusively solved the original, "philosophical," problem.
158.---That's certainly Foucault's understanding of Kant's view.
re: 168
Oh come on. If that's your definition of useful there are acres of philosophy that count as useful by that standard. If 'useful' means something like 'closes of some unfruitful avenue for investigation'.
The thing to remember about convincing James B. Shearer about things is that James B. Shearer is a robot. A friendly one. But keep in mind.
I thought pdf was the robot. Tim's the brain in a vat, and I wasn't aware that Shearer's category had been determined as yet.
Is everyone happy with the recent playing-with-pseuds that's been going on? Cause I am, deeply -- but I picture it giving some of our community agitae.
OT: The Band's "Ophelia" is one of the best songs ever recorde. "Please darken my door".
173 -- many of us have mechanical components.
"I wasn't aware that Shearer's category had been determined as yet."
Friendly robot. (see my credentials)
152: It's "baching it," Royal and/or Almanzo say it in The Long Winter, you are correct.
baching it
A verb for classical musicians, surely.
The Band's "Ophelia" is one of the best songs ever recorde. "Please darken my door".
Hm, I don't know. I don't like the Band as much as I used to, but I'd say that "Ophelia" is only about the third best song on the record it's from, which itself ranks pretty low compared to their others. But it's been a long time since I listened to it.
I am listening to it on "The Last Waltz" which has many songs I like but I am thinking "Ophelia" might be the best one. Which record is it from?
It's on Northern Lights--Southern Cross, which I'm only slightly ashamed to acknowledge that I own on vinyl. I think I have everything they released from back then. The version on The Last Waltz is much better--the production on NL--SC is pretty bad, a real wan, washed out (and washed up) seventies vibe. The other two good (or at least decent, for the Band late in their career) are "Acadian Driftwood" and "It Makes No Difference."
I'm listening to "Acadian Driftwood" now -- from The Last Waltz, not NLSC -- and it is good.
The argument against reductionism is good; but the argument, insofar as there is one, against the analytic/synthetic distinction is underwhelming.
Funny, I took exactly the opposite away from Quine; I never bought the analytic/synthetic thing in Kant, so when I got to "Two Dogmas," I was like, "a-HA!!!"
Heidegger says somewhere that the task of philosophy is retain the force of the most elemental words.
Which is what Mallarme et al. thought was the task of poetry; Heidegger had poet envy, big time.
--Me, I think philosophy's as worthwhile as literature. A novel can help you make sense of something in your life, tho it's unlikely to Explain Everything. A work of philosophy can do the same.
Hegel's Phenomenology has its moments, & is interesting to watch unfold, if you don't trouble to understand every sentence -- there is an argument to be made, I think, for skipping straight from "Sense-Certainty" to "Self-Consciousness," with similar leaps in the section on natural science. His overall vision is intriguing, if implausible. But so is Aristotle's, and Kant's, and every other philosopher's ... except for those who shun an "overall vision," and they're just boring.
Another reason to read Hegel, even a little bit, is that his vocabulary was picked up on by so many others.
Heidegger says somewhere that the task of philosophy is retain the force of the most elemental words.
*barf*
152: It's "baching it," Royal and/or Almanzo say it in The Long Winter, you are correct.
Think the pronunciation of this word might have changed, and the ch once have been less plosive?
*barf*
Is, indeed, one of the most elemental words.
If you're not a hipster, young Ben, why then do you act like one?
193: That's how you know he's a hipster.
181+ OT:Vapeur Mauve by the Haunted is not only the best cover, but improves on the original title.
That I act like a hipster is precisely what I deny, ogged, since otherwise there would be little sense to my denial (if, anyway, you're a behaviorist about hipsterdom, a position which does make some sense).
Your hipsterdom is well-established, young Ben, but perhaps, in the spirit of learning and comity, you'd simply like to expand on your "*barf*," which seems to be the issue before us.
It should have been clear from the fact that you called me a hipster in response to my *barf*ing that what I meant by it was the issue before us, I suppose; you can expect, if you like, an expansion in a few hours (train-related program activities will interfere in-betweenwise).
Hi, I'm back!
Here's what I meant by *barf*: what you've attributed to Heidegger seems to be the worst sort of gauzy Romantic/mystic baloney, the sort of thing espoused by people who think there's a real principled difference to be made between poetry and verse (or art and craft generally) and that the former gets at some sooper-dooper truths through basically hermetic means. (I generally don't like anything that smacks of this sort of dreck about poetry; recently had to read something that went on about what "we" do & feel when "we" read a poem, blah.) At least in Schelling I could understand to some extent why this was so important.
Plus, to the extent I understand it, what's philosophy got to do with it? "Retain the force of the most elemental words"? What words are "most elemental"? What is the force of a word? Is the force identical across all langauges, or just German and Greek, the languages of Being? There's an anecdote that a student of Wittgenstein's (can't remember who) recounts about going somewhere where there was a waterfall and standing in its midst, surrounded by thousands of gallons of water rushing down, and saying or thinking "now I know what DOWN means". I take it that "down" is not a "most elemental word" (maybe only moderately elemental?), but if that's the sort of thing he's on about, what's philosophy got to do with it? If not, what?
Now, retaining the force of the most elemental kobe is important.
Think the pronunciation of this word might have changed, and the ch once have been less plosive?
I'm pretty sure it was indeed pronounced like "batching," it's just that "baching" is how Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane rendered it.
Christ, my friends, talk about a minefield. What is philosophy? There's something to be said for any number of formulations, but it becomes so tiresome, so tiresome. One's tempted to throw out a bunch of random remarks:
There is no such thing as philosophy; therefore one cannot say what it is.
There is no such thing as philosophy; there is only doing philosophy. One could as well do philosophy, then point to it and say: That is philosophy.
There are numerous ways to do philosophy. If you're a philosopher of language (and perhaps a certain sort of political or literary theorist), philosophy explores the nature of language-use.
Look, this started as another absurd call to justify philosophy as a discipline, and the obvious candidates were trotted out as demonstrations of its suspect nature. I've had so many conversations about that over the last 15 years. One eventually decides that the question is ill-formed.
At least that's not a hipster answer, Ben. In the context (B&T 220) Heidegger writes what he does, the elemental word under consideration is "truth," and he's giving his spiel about truth as uncovering--that's the elemental sense that he thinks has been forgotten, and that he wants to retain. And a big part of his project, as you know, is to both retrieve lost senses of various words and concepts, and also to note how little we actually encounter (consider? engage with?) the things that we nevertheless feel free to talk about. And I don't think the elemental words are really so mysterious. They're the things philosophy is about: truth, beauty, wisdom, happiness, etc. And the "force" of a word is the degree to which it uncovers, for its users, the phenomenon to which it refers, which differs across times and cultures and speakers.
Ogged, there's nothing elemental about the words "truth", "beauty", "wisdom", etc. Weiner surely pointed out use/mention errors while he still graced us with his presence often enough for you to see where this is going: truth, beauty, wisdom, and the rest might be elemental, but what's the "force of the words" crap? Now, there might be a "force" of the word "aletheia" that we can recover, but that would just be a point about its meaning, or at worst its etymology (though one wants to be careful about that, since it could be wrong): a-letheia. What has that to do with "truth" or "Wahrheit" or "veritas"? One mounts philosophical arguments about truth, not about "truth".
Now, I wrote the above without having read your last sentence: And the "force" of a word is the degree to which it uncovers, for its users, the phenomenon to which it refers, which differs across times and cultures and speakers.
I understand by this something like the extent to which the word itself seems to fit or display its referent, something that could vary across time with the individual speaker and seems not entirely unrelated to Wittgensteinian secondary senses (except instead of talking about whether Tuesday is fat and Wednesday lean or vice versa, it would be about whether "Tuesday" really goes with Tuesday). That just doesn't seem like the proper object of retention. How do you retain that?
Parsimon is seeking to restore its elemental force to the word "philosophy."
N.b., the notion that a word has "elemental force" must be what fascinated Derrida about Heidegger.
And Ben, I think that, if Heidegger can be defended here, his thesis was that knowing the more "primeval" sense of the word "aletheia," say, was that it would better illuminate what Plato and Aristotle, not to forget Heraclitus et al., were talking about when they used the word -- that it would illuminate the contexts where it appears.
Classicists mostly think Heidegger was loopy about those kinds of arguments, but they're at least interesting.
his thesis was that knowing the more "primeval" sense of the word "aletheia," say, was that it would better illuminate what Plato and Aristotle, not to forget Heraclitus et al., were talking about when they used the word -- that it would illuminate the contexts where it appears.
Leaving behind his particular interpretation of what "aletheia" means, well, of course; who would deny that? Just as knowing that "arete" is not a moral virtue in the post-christian sense. It's good to know what someone is talking about. But surely the point of philosophy is not to make it possible to ... read philosophy?
But surely the point of philosophy is not to make it possible to ... read philosophy?
Tee-hee.
Sorry, man. Sounds defensible to me, though not in the way Anderson's rendering it for Heidegger.
By which I mean, of course, that the best philosophy is engaged in the task of teaching you how to read it.
204:
That just doesn't seem like the proper object of retention. How do you retain that?
Lastly, not wanting to step on Ben's reply that's actually directed to Ogged, but:
I like that Ben's pressing in turn on each of the terms of Ogged's initial formulation: Retain the force of the most elemental words.
It's just good old-fashioned unpacking. I like to see it.
How do you retain that?
By paying attention to things and taking care with your language. I don't mean to be flip, but that's pretty much it. Of course, it's hard to do...
By paying attention to things and taking care with your language.
Heidegger is a logical positivist!
But surely the point of philosophy is not to make it possible to ... read philosophy?
Sure it is, preliminarily. If you don't know how to read philosophy, you aren't going to learn what it has to teach you.
And as Ogged will affirm, Heidegger is *all* about the preliminaries: Walter Kaufmann said that Heidegger is always getting to the point from which it will be possible to lay the groundwork to begin to ask the question.
Philosophy is what PhD's with philosophy appointments get paid to do.
So Rorty wasn't a philosopher after he left Princeton?
Actually, Emerson has a point, though not the one he probably thinks he's making: philosophy is a construct. As is literature. As is nearly any other field. I'm not sure why I would qualify that with a "nearly."
Professionally, no.
Philosophy is a hiring-monopoly construct.