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[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

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On 10.07.2016 16:17, Monte Davis wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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