File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2000/foucault.0009, message 99


From: "Nathan Goralnik" <rhizome85-AT-home.com>
Subject: nussbaum/kierkegaard/nuclear war
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 19:08:33 -0700


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They were already posted by Dan Irom. If you need them (Wade Deisman,
this is true for you specifically), you need to include your e-mail
address in the text of the e-mail, because sometimes I get your
nickname but not your actual e-mail address, and then I can't
respond.

I feel horrible for clogging the list like this. To make it up to you
I will include some kind of intelligent quote below: (William Barret,
(philosopher and literary critic), Irrational Man, 1958, p. 3)

"THE story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so
abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until,
one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead. It is a story
that has a special point today, since this civilization of ours has
at last got its hands on weapons with which it could easily bring
upon itself the fate of Kierkegaard's hero: we could wake up tomorrow
morning dead-and without ever having touched the roots of our own
existence. There is by this time widespread anxiety and even panic
over the dangers of the atomic age; but the public soul-searching and
stocktaking rarely, if ever, go to the heart of the matter. We do not
ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are
that have brought us into this danger; we do not dare to be
philosophical. Uneasy as we are over the atomic age, on the crucial
question of existence itself we choose to remain as absent-minded as
the man in Kierkegaard's story. One reason we do so lies in the
curiously remote position to which modern society has relegated
philosophy, and which philosophers themselves have been content to
accept."

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