Gripe about/discuss stuff you have to read for school

[tberton]

So I've just started my MA in Public History. I'm really enjoying the program so far and the people are great, but some of the stuff I've had to read is incredibly dense. It's interesting and informative, but not super clearly written. For instance, I'm currently reading Hans-Georg Gadamer, a mid-century German philosopher. Here is a line from Chapter 2 of his book Philosophical Hermeneutics

 

"My thesis is - and I think it is the necessary consequence of recognizing the operativeness of history in our conditionedness and finitude - that the thing which hermeneutics teaches us is to see through the dogmatism of asserting an opposition and separation between the ongoing, natural "tradition" and the reflective appropriation of it."

 

Somebody wrote that with a straight face.

 

Anyway, does anybody else have any interesting/horror stories from their studies?

[tegan]

Not quite the same, but one of my college professors was super big into making us study The Dinner Party, which I fucking hate because it's kind of racist (there's only a single representation of a non-white woman and it's noticeably different from the others); conflates the female experience with genitalia, which just pisses me off; and is generally just kind of trite and tacky, in my opinion.

[tberton]

Oh hey, somebody actually brought up The Dinner Party in this same class, since it's about historical representation. We didn't actually discuss it in detail though.

[miffy495]

I have never had a quote more scream bullshit to me than in my required Continental Philosophy course when I read Heidegger's masterpiece of a sentence: "May the worlding of worlds be the nearest of the nearing that nears."

 

I actually enjoyed some of the writers in that class, and don't view Continental Philosophy with the same disdain that many of the other students I went to school with did, but Heidegger and Hegel can both seriously go fuck themselves.

[Blambo]

I have never had a quote more scream bullshit to me than in my required Continental Philosophy course when I read Heidegger's masterpiece of a sentence: "May the worlding of worlds be the nearest of the nearing that nears."

 

I actually enjoyed some of the writers in that class, and don't view Continental Philosophy with the same disdain that many of the other students I went to school with did, but Heidegger and Hegel can both seriously go fuck themselves.

 

It might be the translation but Sartre has similar weirdness. "Good faith wishes to flee the 'not-believing-what-one-believes'. Bad faith flees being by taking refuge in 'not-believing-what-one-believes'." 

 

Like damn JP what

[Malfsyde]

It might be the translation but Sartre has similar weirdness. "Good faith wishes to flee the 'not-believing-what-one-believes'. Bad faith flees being by taking refuge in 'not-believing-what-one-believes'." 

 

Like damn JP what

 

A dumb sentence but makes sense in the context of how Sartre uses "being" and "bad faith."

 

That always pissed me off about philosophy - the appropriation of generic terms to redefine them with ultra-specific meanings that is only used by a handful of people so you need a glossary for each writer just to penetrate their text. I understand that language is this incomplete and imperfect tool that can not match the complexity of human thought so perhaps it's not fair to strictly blame philosophers especially when so many of them are non-English natives, but at least begin them with capital letters to denote them as being specific named terms.

[Malfsyde]

double post.... I always accidentally quote instead of edit. 

[tberton]

A dumb sentence but makes sense in the context of how Sartre uses "being" and "bad faith."

 

That always pissed me off about philosophy - the appropriation of generic terms to redefine them with ultra-specific meanings that is only used by a handful of people so you need a glossary for each writer just to penetrate their text. I understand that language is this incomplete and imperfect tool that can not match the complexity of human thought so perhaps it's not fair to strictly blame philosophers especially when so many of them are non-English natives, but at least begin them with capital letters to denote them as being specific named terms.

 

Yeah, part of that is that when discussing complex ideas, it's easier to find a single word or group of words to represent a concept that you'll be using a lot rather than constantly having to re-explain what you're talking about. And you use everyday words in slightly different senses, because making up entirely new words is really hard and confusing. Then again, using everyday words gets confusing too because people have a hard time distinguishing between different meanings, as you're saying. A similar problem to this one is why formal logic developed propositional calculus and why mathematicians sought to create formal systems for number theory.

 

Going back to that Gadamer piece, we discussed it in class today and I realized that I understood far more than I thought I had and that he's actually got some extremely interesting ideas. That's what I love about school: sometimes you read a lot of bullshit, but other times you read stuff that looks like bullshit but is in fact just tough to understand, but once you do understand you feel so... expanded, I guess?

[Roderick]

Lord, that quote, tberton. I've never had to read philosophy for school, but did dig into it at my own leisure. I couldn't get through  Nietzsche's Zarathustra, it was so dense and opaquely stacked with metaphors. Beyond Good and Evil was fine though. Just don't let the man get poetic.

[Gormongous]

This is less esoteric and more just bad, but one of the first books I had to read in my grad program for medieval history was Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which was an enormously respected book at the time but was really a mostly middling attempt to reevaluate evidence from the fourth to eighth centuries AD in the most pessimistic light possible to refute arguments that the "fall of Rome" was more of a social and culture transition than a military conquest by so-called barbarians. However, near the end, the author becomes increasingly shrill as he tries his hardest to figure out why anyone could be anything but upset that Rome fell fifteen hundred years ago.

 

He suggests that something of a conspiracy exists between speakers of Germanic languages:

Unsurprisingly, it is in northern Europe and in North America that the idea of the invaders as peaceable immigrants has its home. It is scholars from Austria and Germany, from England, and from Scandinavia who dominate the recent volumes, sponsored by the European Science Foundation, that examine the fifth-century settlements and depict them as essentially undisruptive. English and French were the official languages of this project, but I am told that the discussions that produced these particular volumes occasionally veered into German, the obvious common language of the participants.

 

He suggests that it's a PR campaign to rehabilitate Germany by proxy after the Second World War:

For instance, there is certainly a link between interpretations of the Germanic invaders as primarily peaceful, and the remarkable (and deserved) success that modern Germany has had at constructing a new and positive identity within Europe, after the disastrous Nazi years. Images of the fifth-century Germanic peoples and their settlement in the western empire have changed dramatically since the Second World War, as ideas about modern Germans and their role in the new Europe have altered.

Later, he blames Mussolini and the Fascists for souring everyone on the glory of Rome.

 

He suggests a political agenda tied to the European Union:

The European Union needs to forge a spirit of cooperation between the once warring nations of the Continent, and it is no coincidence that the European Science Foundation's research project into this period was entitled 'The Transformation of the Roman World'--implying a seamless and peaceful transition from Roman times to the 'Middle Ages' and beyond. In this new vision of the end of the ancient world, the Roman empire is not 'assassinated' by Germanic invaders; rather, Romans and Germans together carry forward much that was Roman, into a new Romano-Germanic world. 'Latin' and 'Germanic' Europe are at peace.

This goes on for three pages and mostly focuses on the popularity of the word "Charlemagne" in both France and Germany.

 

And, amazingly, his final point is that Americans are just sore from being part of a certain other empire just two hundred and fifty years ago:

The vision of Late Antiquity as full of positive cultural achievements also has obvious roots in modern attitudes to the world. It is, for instance, no great surprise that the Roman empire is not particularly in favour at the moment, and therefore that its demise is not deeply regretted. In Europe, empires and imperialism went firmly out of fashion in the decades following the Second World War, while in the United States, which traces its origins to a struggle for freedom from British imperial control, they have seldom enjoyed specific favor. The 'Empire' in Hollywood's Star Wars is the force of evil, its storm troopers modelled partly on Roman praetorian guards.

 

I am no advocate of twenty-first century imperialism--empires, it seems to me, have had their day--but it is a mistake to treat all empires of the past as universally bad in an undifferentiated way...

I can't even bear to type out the whole thing. He basically says that, with the Roman Empire at least, the ends justify the means and we should all just be grateful for the gifts of their culture.

 

His reason for thinking so? He was born the son of an archaeologist in Rome. I should feel lucky that his biases are so obvious:

Despite my upbringing, I have never much liked the ancient Romans--to me they too often seem self-important and self-satisfied--and I have much more sympathy for the chaotic and difficult world of post-Roman times. On the other hand, it has always seemed self-evident that the Romans were able to do remarkable things, which, after the fall of the empire, could not be done again for many hundreds of years.

Self-important and self-satisfied, you say? This is possibly the most flatly dishonest thing I have ever read.

 

The scholarship's no good either. He uses arguments from silence constantly as well as statistical analyses where the sample size is only one or two digits. Attacking the fad book of several professors, like I did, turned out to be a rough way to start my upper-level academic career, although not ultimately ruinous.