to rock and roll
I want seduction and resonance
I’m yer huckleberry
d63: who do you read? Of the great philosophers, who do you vehemently abhor?
That’s difficult question. I generally don’t have as much time to read philosophy as much I would like, so I’ve had to focus on what interested me or what I could use. My preference, as might be obvious to you already, is toward the continental, so analytic philsophy tends to reside at the bottom of my reading wish list. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to understand it better or consider it invalid.
The closest I can come to an answer (though I’m not sure she counts) is Ayn Rand. I tried reading The Virtues of Selfishness and got so nauseaus that I couldn’t go on. But then, you did say “great philosphers”.
I’ll have to think about it.
As for who I read: I like the poststructuralists and critical theorist on to the postmoderns. I’m utterly intrigued by Deluez and Guattarri while being equally beffuddled as to what it is they’re saying. Sartre has had a huge impact on me. I’ve read Layotard’s Postmodern Condition several times throughout my life and will continue to do so. I tend to read a lot of second hand interpretive texts, so while I haven’t read them directly as of yet, I’m heavily influenced by Derrida’s deconstrucion (or as I like to call it: d.construction) and Roland Barthe’s idea of reading and interpreting the signs in popular culture -TV commercials often repulse me. And my original post is a flagrant hijacking of Neitzche’s “dance of thought”.
And like a common vulture, I picked at the meat of Border’s bone and came out of it with about 9 books. So what I will be getting into is Marcuse, Foucault, Searle, Baudrillard, and Rorty.
Well, your tastes are almost identical to my own. I loved Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. I continue to read Deleuze, Derrida, Foucalt, and I just finished Barthes’ Mythologies. Carry on, my friend.
I had meant to bring this up on a separate string, but I suppose this is as good a place as any to bring up the issue of seduction and resonance.
As many other human activities (reason, precision, truth, etc.) as we tend to base what Philosophy should be based on, I think it, ultimately, comes down to seduction and resonance. It comes down to how we can apply what we read to our own experience, pre-established beliefs, and agendas. We have to remember that Philosophy is as much about writing and appealing as it is anything else it presumes to be. Furthermore, we have to remember that the value of a philosopher depends on the extent to which we can apply their thoughts to what we as individuals experience every day. We are seduced by it because it resonates with our own experience.
Now there will be those who say this is nonsense, that philosophy seeks the truth above and beyond normal human experience through the tools that our intellectual striving has provided us, through reason and logic and scientific method. But what they are basically telling us is by striving to obtain these tools; they have earned the right to tell us what our reality is. What they fail to understand is that those tools are only effective to the extent that they give us a better understanding of our day to day reality. They cannot tell us what our reality is.
Furthermore, I would argue that those who gravitate towards the more dry analytic approach to philosophy, do so because it seduces and resonates with the more anal retentive aspect of their personality. They tend to do so because it represents an ordering of the chaos they are incapable of bearing. This is not to say that it is wrong. It takes all kinds. And they have as much value in the general discourse as any. It is only a warning concerning the assumption that their results have more value than that of the continental simply because it uses the scientific method. It fails to recognize that it is as susceptible to prejudice and personal agendas as any. None of us works in a vacuum.
Of course, some will argue that Hitler worked from seduction and resonance as well. And this would be true. The problem is that he also worked from the seduction and resonance of making life better for his people, and that’s kind of hard to disagree with. The Jewish holocaust and the desire for world domination were only contingent aspects of the desire, not a necessity. We’re humans, not empty machines waiting for someone to program some ideology into us to tell us what to do. We do what we do for reasons well beyond ideology. Therefore, it would be silly to think that just because an ideological construction has some similarity with one involved in evil that said ideology will automatically lead to evil. And it’s equally silly to think that we will find an ideology incapable of leading to evil.
In fact, I would argue that the answer is no answer, only the seduction and resonance we experience along the way.