Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 13:02:55 -0700 From: Patrick Crosby <pcrosby-AT-ieee.org> Subject: Re: the cult of personality <!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> The short answer to your question is that in the case of the majority of books, technical papers, and essays I read, I know absolutely nothing the author personally, yet I read them with profit. Sure, I can pick up a book on probability theory and see a dedication to a family member or friend of the authors, but it does not affect the technical content one iota. His proofs are good or bad, regardless well or badly he may treat his spouse. The fact that Claude Shannon died a month or so ago of Alzheimer's disease may well be a tragedy in and of itself, but it has nothing to do with the theory of which he is the undisputed founder. It has nothing to do with any of the papers he published during his long illustrious career. <br> In the case of poetry, I will admit that knowing something of the poet's life can at time inform ones reading of the poet's work. Georg Trakl is a good example of this. However, I fail to see how knowing that Robert Frost threw fits of rage over nothing, and almost killed his wife once, enhances ones appreciation of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." <br> The long answer is that I am not saying that, as a general principle, it is not helpful to use details of an author's personal life as a basis for assessing the quality or merit of his work: I am saying that it is <i>dangerous</i> to do so--- dangerous to the advancement of science, to academic freedom, and an impediment to ones own intellectual advancement. The simple reason for this is that in doing such, one ventures outside the realm of science, theory, and intellectual discourse and into the realm of superstition, bias, and prejudice. As such, the merit of scientific claims is then judged on the basis of bias and prejudice. It is precisely on the basis of this kind of thinking that Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church, and Giordano Bruno was burned alive by that same honorable institution in 1600 for maintaining that the universe was infinite. It is also the kind of thinking that led to the Salem witch burnings in this country, the slaughter of a Million Vietnamese people in the name of "freedom" by the US government, with overwhelming support of its citizenry, and the persecution of thousands of intellectuals and artists in the old Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution in China in more recent decades. <br> If what you suggest were ever to become accepted as a general principle, book publishers would have the right to know everything about the personal life of a book's author, just as students would have a right to know everything about the personal lives of their professors. There would be no such thing as "privacy" for anyone involved in academic or intellectual life. Such would be a dark world indeed, one I hope I never live to see. <br> <br> <p>"Patrick M. Krueger" wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE>On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Patrick Crosby wrote: <br>> <br>> Come on dude, this is all a bunch of bullcrap and you know it. Plato's <br>> texts, like all texts, stand on their own. Your claim "to have known <br>> Plato the person" is laughable. <p>i believe that we can read texts "as if" they stand on their own, but even <br>then they come with baggage. such as our own cultural context, our own <br>interests, our own training. otherwise, a literate 6th grader could read <br>foucault or kant or debeauvoir and get the same thing from it as a person <br>who studies philosophy for a living. <p>reading is interpretive. <br>interpretation takes place in a context. <p>maybe knowing more about the context of gay politics in the u.s. and <br>france, of aids, of sadomasochism, or the stigma, of the pride, etc would <br>help one understand why foucault was so interested in truth/power. perhaps <br>when one feels constrained by "truths" (ie. it's morally wrong to be gay, <br>it's a reason to be persecuted, it is/was a psychiatric disorder, etc) one <br>has to ask why they have so much power, what makes that possible. how <br>power circulates in society. and then one applies that thought more <br>generally. say, to sexuality, to prisons, etc. <p>hell, why did franz fanon write about "the wretched of the earth"? <br>"black skins, white masks"?maybe his personal experiences informed his <br>method, thought, tactics, in some way? perhaps? <p>i don't understand how a person could think that knowing a person's <br>biographical experiences wouldn't inform a reading of their work. it may <br>not provide "The One True" reading, but it would inform that reading. <p>pmk</blockquote> </html>
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