TCoL49 - relevance - from lithub.com

[Monte Davis]

Ach! Wir sind unwurdig.

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 12:41 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Das Niveau auf diesem Forum ist derzeit wirklich bemerkenswert.
>
>
>
> 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> 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>
>> 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
>>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160711/2ecc5e37/attachment.html>