Wanderings

About A Border Passage, my friend writes me:

“it’s a memoir
it was very interesting how she went over
the history of the middle east
and what being ‘arab’ means

her critique of said’s orientalism was interesting

as well as her comment on the state of feminism in the
US in the 70s
…
if you ever read it,
i’d love to know what you think of it
for me, the good part came at the very end
in the beginning, i was worried she was
going to be another amy tang (joy luck club)”

I am sending this for Christmas to three people close to me. The time to take the time for something like understanding.

Regarding the current situation with the United States’ undeclared war on Iraq, perhaps a quote from the German National Socialist (Nazi) Hermann Göring is in order:

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

—Hermann Göring, at the Nüremberg trials after WWII

My cynicism about computers and the power hungry ways of operating system (OS) manufacturers have tended to temper my willingness to enter the “PC vs. Mac” debate. However, I have just read the most articulate and beautiful exposition as to why Mac OS X is so much better than Windows, and I have found it reverberating in unexpected ways in terms of how I think about all the little things I immerse myself in daily. Compared to what computers should be, both OS options (as well as Linux, Solaris, etc.) are quite terrible. But within the general failings, there are differences, and significant differences. Some differences might even lead to inspiration. An excerpt:

Ever feel like so much that passes for ‘thoughtfulness’ are just sound-bytes of gathered cultural trinkets, or that much of what passes for scholarship is a narcissistic exercise in second-hand verbiage? Well, there’s always Pataphysics. The collection of essays in Pataphysica is as good an introduction as any. Might as well give it a try, or a push.

Hermeneutics as Politics takes note of something most American academics seem (tone) deaf to: The political nature of continental philosophy. Our continuing fear of genuine political thought leaves us all the more vulnerable to appropriating the latest in critical theory like so much fashion. This book tries to address this synaptic deafness, and in so doing perhaps takes an unnecessarily strident tone of argument. But I can overlook the slightly paranoid edges to what is otherwise an excellent book. Stanley Rosen’s analysis of post-modern hermeneutics from a politico-historical perspective is nothing short of brilliant. The chapter “Platonic Reconstruction” is worth the cost of the entire book.

The Gift of Death is a rare glimpse into Derrida’s attachment to, and estrangement from religion. His discussion of Kierkegaard, while somewhat facile, provides a safe entryway for him to discuss Abraham, and how faith and the gift share a unique, and (dare I say) an-economic relation. The book builds on and presupposes many of the themes in Given Time: I. Reading it together with Stanley Rosen’s Hermeneutics as Politics is a treat.

Godric is one of my favorite books because it is a unique entry point into a consciousness and mindset that is difficult for us to understand or respect: Creaturely-ness and repentance.It’s language is a brilliant achievement in it’s own right.

In an age of disaffection, Taylor’s serious and reverent study Sources of the Self seems strangely out of place. In it he offers us an exploration of self-hood which draws as much upon a phenomenology of the self as it does upon a genealogy of the self. This enormous undertaking is unified by his concern with values in the shaping of the self. Perhaps the central argument of the book is that one must value to be a self. Valuing can take the form of denouncing any values which conflict with others already held (however hidden the already held values may be), and it can also take the form of implicitly or explicitly affirming some set of goods. The implicitness/explicitness of moral values lies at the root of some of our society’s core concerns, as do the issues of identity and cohesion. Both issues are related. All sides carry useful knives.

Taylor’s contention is that the modern self is not one which has banished all values or goods from intellectual pursuit, but rather one which has suppressed any articulation of goods in the interest of furthering the goods of universal benevolence, freedom and the affirmation of ordinary life. Through his genealogy of the modern self he shows how the rejection of goods does not come about arbitrarily, but rather follows inevitably from the “progress” a culture wants to make. This progress comes about through sifting through those goods which have been seen to be destructive or unsatisfactory or most importantly, inhibitive of the goods one wishes to promote. In other words, the naturalism so prevalent today is not, as commonly conceived, a discarding of primitive value assertions for the sake of the intellectual possibility and epistemological semi-certainty that values may not exist, but rather because the destruction of hyper-goods enhances the goods of freedom, universal benevolence and ordinary life.You can read the entire paper here: http://brokenhill.net/wanderings/value.html.

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is perhaps best described as monumental. Whether the author’s conclusions are palatable to you or not, this book remains invaluable simply for the nearly perfectly written history of Western thought it contains. A humane, conscientious treatment of the reasons we both need and fear ethics.