Hugging the Horse

Philosophy, Literature, Narcissism and Nonsense

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The Adventures of Marx and Engels, #34

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The critique of the Standard Social Sciences Model that has been emerging from the cognitive and evolutionary communities is not that traditional accounts have underestimated the importance of biological factors relative to environmental factors in human life. Instead, the target is the whole framework that assumes that “biological factors” and “environmental factors” refer to mutually exclusive sets of causes that exist in some kind of explanatory zero-sum relationship, so that the more one explains “biologically” the less there is to explain “socially” or “environmentally."

Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby

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Wittgenstein Ph.D., Episode #10

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Surrealist observational stand-up comedy, #3

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Zarathustra the Horse and Friedrich the Übermensch, #1

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It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice [...] The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this "sense of mastery" conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman's claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.

John Searle on why English Literature departments are in love with Deconstruction.

As an English Literature graduate I sincerely hope that one day Literature departments will decide to include the study of literature in their courses, instead of simply training students to scan books for equivalences with post-structuralist theory and to come away sneering at other disciplines for not doing the same.

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In my student-days, for example, I found the university philosophers very ordinary men indeed, who had collected together a few conclusions from the other sciences, and in their leisure hours read the newspapers and went to concerts; they were treated by their academic colleagues with politely veiled contempt. They had the reputation of knowing very little, but of never being at a loss for obscure expressions to conceal their ignorance. They had a preference for those obscure regions where a man could not walk long with clear vision. One said of the natural sciences, "Not one of them can fully explain to me the origin of matter; then what do I care about them all?"— Another said of history, "It tells nothing new to the man with ideas": in fact, they always found reasons for its being more philosophical to know nothing than to learn anything. If they let themselves be drawn to learn, a secret instinct made them fly from the actual sciences and found a dim kingdom amid their gaps and uncertainties.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

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I once came across a book about Marxist economics vs. Neoclassical economics which was 120 pages of the assholist objection endlessly repeated.

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Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy, #3

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Human rationality, to Hegel, is not a faculty possessed by human beings, like sensibility or the imagination, which they exercise in isolation as monadic units. He thinks of rationality as the considerations we offer each other when our actions affect what others would otherwise be able to do. Rationality is a social practice and it has a history, as do the elements connected with it, such as the concept of subject or agent.

Robert Pippin

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America is among Wiseau’s major talking points: “We are Americans,” he told me, “and we cherish our freedom.” Americanness is also the central, and centrally unexamined, theme of The Room. Wiseau cast himself within the film as a hunk of Johnny Americana, with no corresponding recognition of how absurdly ill fitting this role actually is. Whenever the film’s Johnny throws a football, you do not see Johnny. What you see is the ungainly shot put of an eastern European who did not grow up throwing footballs. This is the most longingly human aspect of The Room and, not at all coincidentally, the hardest thing to laugh at.

Tom Bissell - Magic Hours

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