Why modern philosophy is a low stakes game

...the particular merit of Western philosophy is to have placed the question of truth center stage, sacrificed everything for it, going so far as to eventually consent to a form of suicide, reducing its own scope to that of an epistemological complement. It is Nietzsche, I think, that big subtle cat, who first recognized the dangers the sciences having more or less killed off revealed truths would have on philosophy itself. But it was he, consequently, who tried to taint the search for truth with suspicion. He thereby opened up in philosophy what might be called the era of disloyalty. Because what is philosophy if it relegates the search for truth to the background? We're pretty much back to the sophists.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

Some things really did happen

Am distracted / engrossed in life and so little to post here, but some more from that Sokal book that I want to keep online.

Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivity evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence.

Eric Hobsbawm, On History pviii, quoted in Sokal p321

It is [...] pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth ...Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it. ...But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess.

Alan Ryan, quoted in Sokal p95

Over and gone

four stroke

Everything depends on opinion; ambition, luxury, greed, hark back to opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is. I hold that we should do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: “None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured! No one has thought that I shall recover. How often have my family bewailed me, and the physicians given me over! Men who are placed on the rack are not torn asunder with such agony!” However, even if all this is true, it is over and gone. What benefit is there in reviewing past sufferings, and in being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy? Besides, every one adds much to his own ills, and tells lies to himself. And that which was bitter to bear is pleasant to have borne; it is natural to rejoice at the ending of one’s ills.

Seneca, On the healing power of the mind

Typhoon day / Not a lucid one

Fractal leaf on Flickr

A typhoon came along to save me from Monday. As the news that it would hit filtered out the supermarkets were packed. People were buying carbohydrates - noodles, crackers, cookies, candy, chips. The place near me is a small, low class supermarket, the kind that sells no fresh produce, and if you can find more than two attractive, healthy looking people there then it's a special day. I know, because it's a game I always play there.

To think that with a better diet and some exercise, some curiosity, many of the patrons could be cultivating the ubermensch within instead of paying to do themselves harm. Of course, I lined up and bought instant noodles, crackers, milk with the rest of them, doing my part to keep the day unspectacular.

I slept late and worked on a stack of proofreading, trying to break the back of it so the rest of the week is just classes, fueled by coffee, water, tequila and spicy dried squid. The tequila is good stuff that Yuki picked up at the airport, the kind you sip at room temperature and enjoy.

Part two. I studied film & literature at university, hence my borderline unemployability. It was in the early 90s, so hours spent dealing with modern French philosophers who put me to sleep but also suggested there was another game I could play, putting fine words together in ways that gave the illusion of meaning. But I never became a real academic, just a freelance bottom-feeder in Taiwan, and I never have any regrets about that because of the awful things I'd be stuck teaching. It was great to come across this 1998 book review by Richard Dawkins, Postmodernism disrobed, that ripped the shit out the whole game. It begins:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

And continues with much wonderful stuff.