Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 17:57:52 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <hegel-l-AT-bucknell.edu>
Subject: Re:  DUQUETTE ON SYSTEM & METHOD


David Duquette replies:

>It is perhaps most appropriate with the coming millennium to
>reflect on just how foolish we philosophers are ....

Please do reflect on how foolish you 'philosophers' are, while
keeping in mind all the while that a philosopher is more than an
academic.  It is indeed a respectable accomplishment for one to
have the training and skill to be able to write exegeses of and
proper footnotes on German philosophers: such a discipline,
however, is not isomorphic with the skill of knowing how to think
and attack the intellectual and social problems that surround you.
When one combines unquestionable accomplishments in the former
realm with intolerably childlike naivete in the latter, there is
something seriously wrong, something that cries out for the most
cynical of responses.  How could it be that people steeped for
decades in an intellectual discipline relating the abstract to the
concrete, dialectically interrelating parts and wholes, and
constantly producing the owl of Minerva quotation like a wallet
photo, be so thoroughly incompetent in attacking any intellectual
problem outside of the exegesis of the texts on which they built
their expertise?  And how might it be possible, for Hegelian
scholars who surely must know something about Feuerbach, not to
mention having absorbed more than a century of the "cynicism" Dr.
Van Gelding used to caterwaul about, still to act like nervous
virgins when contemplating their own intercourse with social
reality?

I envision three basic stages of deflowering Duquette's
self-proclaimed political virginity:

(1) Exposing the idiocy of his post of 6 Aug 1996 on world
historical individuals, wherein he counterposes Hegel to Marx;

(2) Returning to his ridiculous portrayal of Marx as a priori
philosopher in a post a year or two old, which Duquette re-posted
to me a few months back on my request;

(3) Following through on Feuerbach's insight, whose implications
seem not to have been thought through by very many people of any
persuasion, that philosophy, as a form of alienated consciousness
(as much as religion), cannot seriously be taken at its own
self-valuation, but must be seen as something other than what it
purports to be.  Duquette thinks he is a philosopher; in time we
shall see what he really is.



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