Do people tell you that everything that you believe has already been deconstructed, and that your whole mode of thinking is a relic of an outmoded past? Do they say that this has been demonstrated clearly, except that you are just too poorly educated to understand? Have you struggled to make sense of these things, and it seemed like you were almost getting it, but you were never quite able to take the final leap? Read the paper posted here, it explains everything: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ Trust the stalwart Aussies to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. (It's probably the Vegemite.)
Some years ago, at the time of the Men at Work song The Land Down Under, someone wanted to import Vegemite into Canada. It was denied as being unfit for human consumption.
Bill, re the linked paper: When I began to learn Greek, the very first thing we were given to read was Aristotle's Categories. I recall whining a lot. After reading that paper, I have no idea what my problem was back then.
Alan D. Sokal is a professor of Physics at NYU. In 1995 he wrote an essay entitled, Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity He submitted this essay to a leading journal of cultural studies called Social Text, and it was published by that journal the next year. Following the publication, Dr. Sokal wrote another essay entitled, A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies and this was published by another leading journal, Lingua Franca. In the second essay Dr. Sokal explained that the first essay was complete rubbish. He had simply cobbled together all the right jargon, cited all the right people, bashed all the right people and come to all the right (i.e. "progressive") conclusions. He reported that he had written it specifically so that it made no sense and yet the editors of Social Text had eaten it up, believing it to be a scholarly article. It's a hilarious soap opera within the academic/cultural community, with accusations and allegations flying back and forth through the relevant journals for months and years afterwards. You can read all about it here: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~nexa/sokal/ If you look at Sokal's original essay, it reads much like the one cited by Bill above. Jack
Sokal, et. al., produced "Fashionable Nonsense" from this scandal--a fine effort. But the fact is that France IS a colony of German philosophical ideas; the "French" part is but a footnote to German Idealism buttressed by Descarte's radical skepticism. A much better read exposing contemporary nonsense is the slim but rediculously pricey "American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas" by Dario Fernandez-Morera, a Northwestern comparative lit prof. $73 new--but worth every penny. Why? Fernandez-Morera tackles almost every contemporary Leftist lunacy, from PC to feminism, from deconstructionism to affirmative action, and "free thought" for Leftist ideas in universities but not any rivals. How? By showing that these ideas are predated by marxist scholarship in communist nations--and they made their cases better!!! THAT's right! The "fashionable nonsense" spouted today was said more clearly and affirmatively by state-sucking commie scholars decades earlier. What looks "new" and "fashionable" today (and recently) is in fact much older and far more PC in origin than you ever imagined! But you must read it to really "know" it. --Orson PS Christians reading this will be interested in how the author employs the term "materialist" throughout to expose the crude Hegelian reductionism at work in today's fashionable ideologies. The problem he exposes is their logical circularity. Thus, "scientific socialism" and its descendant are shown to be--as the Beattles put it--about the "real No Where [i.e. utopia] Man!"
Other than WAUC naming a "university" after him, has anyone anything good to say about Hegel anymore?
I was reading the latest 'Fortean Times' and one of their columnists ('The Hierophant') said something to the effect that half of what he believes was learned from the 'Internet Conspiracy Generator'. That's a computer program similar to the 'Postmodernism Generator' that creates conspiracy theories by stringing together unrelated conspiracy allegations embedded in text that preserves grammar and recursive internal references. It's striking how total incoherence can attain a superficial but perhaps persuasive resemblance to deep and profound thinking that way. I think that this kind of pseudo-reasoning is all too common in real life, especially when it constitutes a rationalization for something that one wants to believe anyway.
Hey Uncle, Check out Francis Fukyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" (1993). He derives much of his post fall-of-communism optimism from Hegel's theory of history development. Briefly, "The End of History" notion goes as follows: In the beginning of history, the "first men" sought to gain power over others because of his desire for recognition. Thus the world was divided into a master class and a slave class. The masters enjoyed freedom, while the slave sought freedom elusively. The history of man is the history of masters and slaves. The "end of history" is when the slave class reaches equality with the masters. This has only happened under Liberal Democracy. It is worth reading and stands bt many accounts as one of the nost important books of the decade. --Orsn
