Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 05:13:35 -0400
To: Multiple recipients of list <hegel-l-AT-bucknell.edu>
Subject: DUQUETTE ON SYSTEM & METHOD


David Duquette becomes more reactionary, naive, blockheaded, and
intellectually cowardly with each passing post.

>In the last section of the Science of Logic Hegel is clear
>that method cannot be abstracted from the system (from a system)
>and retained as if it were merely an external tool.

OK, then:

>Marx was perhaps the first to articulate this idea of separating
>the method from the system, thereby retaining what was rational
>and discarding the mystical.

Very sloppy scholarship and sloppier analysis.  But there is
more:

>Historically and conceptually this has to be seen as a
>tremendous irony, as it allowed method to be wielded in the most
>oppressive ways.  Method that is cut loose from the discipline
>of systematic thought leads not only to irrationalism but also
>to the tyranny of ideas when they are used to support a vision
>of the "good" that must be attained at *all* costs.

This is just too stupid to be believed.  And what is funny about
it is that it is precisely Duquette and not anybody else who
conceives "attaining the good" "at all costs" as a detached,
unqualified abstraction, devoid of any material context or
contingency.  Should any self-proclaimed intellectual be allowed
to remain so willfully naive at the end of the 20th century?  This
is just contemptible beyond words.



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