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[Monte Davis]

Hegel>  "The people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but have
been on every occasion vanquished themselves."

Herr Hegel needed a visit from Ashoka, Sri Gupta, or Chandragupta Maurya.
It seems to have escaped his world-historical consciousness that the
creation of any of half a dozen Indian empires had involved the unification
of larger numbers of people and languages than Alexander, the Romans,
Charlemagne or Napoleon ever managed.

Perhaps he suffered from the parochial Orientalist perspective of
imperialism -- but no, it couldn't have been that, because it was France
and England that had been carving out territory in the subcontinent while
"Germany" was a hodgepodge of statelets being marched over by Swedes and a
Corsican. You go, GWF -- dare to dream!

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:24 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Speaking of Hegel here is a little excerpt from Barret Brown’s latest
> missive from prison. The whole article is  about his life in prison; his
> humor is relentless and his wiriting sharp as a fresh razor blade. What
> follows is from a section about books and reading.
>
> "I try to keep a copy of something by Hegel with me at all times as well,
> not so much with the intent of reading it straight through, but rather as a
> means by which to play a little game I’ve invented called Shut the Fuck Up,
> Hegel, You Fucking Fraud. What you do is, you flip to a random page in any
> volume of Hegel’s works and look for the inevitable instance of
> hyper-oracular nonsense, such as this line I just randomly came across from
> page 129 of Lectures on the Philosophy of History:
>
> The spread of Indian culture is prehistorical, for history is limited to
> that which makes for an essential epoch in the development of spirit. On
> the whole, the diffusion of Indian culture is only a dumb, deedless
> expansion, that is, without a political act. The people of India have
> achieved no foreign conquests, but have been on every occasion vanquished
> themselves.
>
> Then you write in the margin, “Shut the fuck up, Hegel, you fucking
> fraud.” And from page 51:
>
> What spirit really strives for is the realization of its own concept; but
> in so doing it hides that goal from its own vision; it is proud and quite
> enjoys itself in this alienation from itself.
>
> “Whatever, douche.” “
>
>
> > On Jul 9, 2016, at 2:25 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > ​KFL > ​we've gone through Eddins & Voegelin debates since a former
> millennium again and again
> >
> > As the archives will remind you, I haven't participated in those
> debates. I've never read Voegelin. My "VERY idiosyncratic modern reading"
> is shorthand for "I can't judge how well Eddins reads Voegelin, still less
> how Voegelin in his time read Gnostic studies -- but from my own
> understanding of Gnostic studies, Eddins' POV is very much his own, not a
> consensus."
> >
> > That said, Eddins had a greater influence on my own view of GR (the
> first three Pynchon novels as a whole, not so much) than any critic since
> Schaub and Hite. For me, it brought a useful coherence to what previously
> seemed many conflicting and overlapping stances vis-a-vis "Transcendence
> And How to Get There...Or Is It a Trap?"
> >
> > Understand: I DO NOT KNOW AND DO NOT CARE whether Eddins is a
> true/legitimate/good expositor of Voegelin, or whether either of them is a
> true/legitimate/good expositor of Gnostic scholarship. I like 'The Gnostic
> Pynchon' as an insightful reading of GR...period.
> >
> > PS -- I've nothing to say about the relationship of any of this to
> Heidegger, whom I have tried  to read half a dozen times without success.
> To me, all of Heidegger -- much of Hegel, too -- is either beyond my
> intellectual grasp or incoherent word-spinning, or possibly both. Pity me
> as a philistine and pass by.
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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