/lit/ - Literature

>>11680314
The mental gymnastics leftists will go through to deny the fascist inclinations of their intellectual superiors is fascinating

I don't mean to be a dick but I fucking hate Wolin. That book in particular is godawful. Wolin genuinely cannot do philosophy. It's bizarre to me that someone could spend so much time poring over an author as abstruse as Heidegger, whose whole MO is the radical historicity of all meaning and intention, as an intellectual historian, whose whole job it is to understand meaning and intention to begin with, and then understand it in such a shallow neoliberal finger-wagging way. It's not as bad as his Seduction of Unreason, but close to it.

Not to shit all over it. It is very interesting and worth reading for the work Wolin has done, but his deeper interpretations are completely off point. He doesn't "get" the philosophy, but he has circumscribed it very neatly with his own viewpoint and with a lot of empirical work.

A much better book, IMHO, is Heideger's Political Ontology by Bourdieu. And Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots. Between those two books you're pretty much set for understanding Heidegger.

Seduction of Unreason was truly unfathomably bad. Like, journalistic.

Martin Heidegger is an anagram of Admire the Nigger.

Just thought I'd let you know.

>>11680351
i don't think you're being a dick at all. honestly i'm glad to have gotten a reply from someone who has done the reading on heidegger. thanks for the book recommendations also, i haven't read either of those. will check them out immediately.

can you explain more of why you don't like wolin's books? i just finished the seduction of unreason the other day and found it interesting. i lean more towards the continental side but what i liked about SoE as well as this book is that even criticisms help to throw some more light on what these philosophers are doing and thinking.

not baiting you or looking for a debate or anything like that, just genuinely curious.

>>11680414
>SoE
sorry, typo

>>11680355
unironically based and redpilled

>>11680414
Wolin is okay in certain contexts. His article on Bataille, "Left Fascism?," which I think is in Seduction or the basis for the chapter in SoE, is pretty good. Though his article on Schmitt and the Konservative Revolution is just myopic, assigns way too much "influence" to Nietzsche without really defining or putting forward a sophisticated theoretical perspective on what "influence" consists in. Which is just strange, to me, considering the guy is steeped in Heidegger and Gadamer of all people. Where Wolin ends in his analyses is where he should begin, it just feels like.

Seduction bothered me for a few reasons. Main reason is that he can't do philosophy, again, so it's very "external," he doesn't penetrate into the weltanschauung or metaphysical/linguistic presuppositions of the thinkers he studies, but stays within his own preconceptions of metaphysics/language, and then judges them by translating their utterances hamfistedly into that position. It's like if I tried to critique Freud by saying "Freud thinks he can cure people's maladies, but he made people's maladies worse in many cases!" Maybe saying that kind of thing would be PART of a larger critique, but have I really understood Freud if I haven't entered into the guy's ontological lifeworld at all, and understood and then explained how those maladies were caused and perceived INTERNAL to Freud's worldview? That to me is the interesting part, the part that Bourdieu and Bambach understand perfectly (while obviously being unsympathetic and critical toward Nazism etc.). Wolin is just a neoliberal who wants to say, "Look, Gadamer is sceptical about, or sneers at, what we would conventionally like as neoliberals. And Nietzsche said similar things!" Like, okay, but don't you want to understand why? Don't you want to understand why those things were self-evidently true to Nietzsche and Gadamer?

He also just makes very lazy or embarrassing blunders. I always remember him harping on Gadamer's notion of prejudice (which is simply vor-urteil, prae-iudicare) as if "Gadamer is a proponent of prejudice." Again, how do you work in an intrinsically hermeneutic discipline that comes out of German historicism, and bring that position to bear on the ultimate hermeneutic historicist, and then fail to hermeneutically engage with him at all? Not just your method but your MATTER should be teaching you to know better. It's hard to express the irony, that if he had actually understood Gadamer's concept of prejudice to the point that he could or should write a book about it, then... he would be able to understand the concept of prejudice and how it is hermeneutically/ontologically necessary, and practically/morally ineradicable.

>>11680714
>>11680414
The empirical work can be valuable but it's just sad seeing it. It reminds me of certain analytic philosophers to write histories of ancient and pre-socratic Greek philosophy from the perspective of ahistorical analytic modal logic, and the whole 800 page book, which took 10 years to write, is just them harping on "Haha he doesn't know how to do modal logic." Why would you spend so long studying something you clearly don't understand or even see value in? Wolin's only reason for studying these things is at second or third remove, it's purely his dislike of their political stances.

He'd have been better off studying less philosophical, less metaphysical thinkers, or doing on the ground intellectual history of epigones who imitated Heidegger likewise without really understanding him. He's just not equipped to understand philosophies other than his own.

But I'm probably overblowing it. I had a really bad reaction to it when I read it and I'm maybe puffing this up in my memory to be worse than it is.

And nah not looking to be a contrarian "YOU LIKE WOLIN? FITE ME" guy either.

>>11680714
>>11680714
10/10. such a good post.

i've been thinking recently about peterson and saying, hey, forget about hicks' book on postmodernism, read wolin. like that would at least provide JBP with a more nuanced perspective on the writers he is always criticizing. but now i realize that it could just make things even worse, by arming him with a more careful but arguably even less charitable perspective on those thinkers.

i don't think you're off-track at all, honestly. i think it's that american scholars like wolin (and lilla) perceive a danger to a certain way of life in the influence of people like heidegger and derrida. i don't remember if it's in SoU or elsewhere that wolin notes heidegger's fear of 'Americanization,' which becomes as part of his apprehension about technology mixed in his with other anxieties about communism &c. there's no question to my mind that there's Protecting The Shield prestige points to be gained in making a kind of intellectual counter-offensive against the french and the germans.

on a personal note, i find myself in a weird position v/a lot of this. i tend to agree, for example, with land's teleoplexy argument, which is basically what heidegger predicted:

>Technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, and drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other-these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.

but, ofc, the german political response to this was disaster.

heidegger is probably my #2 favorite guy. when i read B&T it was like, *fucking finally.* and the influence land has had on me since then has only kind of amplified this perspective in various ways. interestingly even land seems to agree that heidegger really nailed something essential also:

>The whole of critique, and the whole of capitalism, can be translated into a discourse on time. Most famously the Heideggerian formulation of critique, that seems to me conservative in its essentials — that’s to say I don’t think it is a candidate for a post-Kantianism, but I think it’s definitely enriching in the fact that it’s quite clear about adding certain insightful formulations, and they tend to be time-oriented. The Heideggerian translation of the basic critical argument is that the metaphysical error is to understand time as something in time.

anyways. ty very kindly for the thoughtful response anon. i agree with a lot of it, very well said.

>if he had actually understood [Gadamer] he would be able to understand the concept of prejudice and how it is hermeneutically/ontologically necessary, and practically/morally ineradicable.

i'd be interested to hear more about this too, if you felt like extrapolating.

>>11680351
>>11680314
How about this one?

I'm suspicious of Bourdieu.

>>11681385
awesome, i haven't read this one either. and i'll chip in a heidegger book of my own.

>>11681385
>I'm suspicious of Bourdieu.
why?