From: "John Duryea" <jtduryea-AT-dmv.com>
Subject: Re: The invariable fate of critical thought
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 17:17:36 -0600



-----Original Message-----
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net <lambdac-AT-globalserve.net>
To: nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
<nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Date: Monday, March 30, 1998 10:10 PM
Subject: The invariable fate of critical thought


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>
>
>DOING HARM TO STUPIDITY (1)
>
>1- The invariable fate of critical thought
>
>It is a comical fate which the thought of critical philosophers
>undergoes.  In the beginning, there is rejection, when not an outright
>effort at repression, of any publicization.  But since all codes are
>leaky, soon enough - often after their death - one finds the formation
>of congregations around the damned texts, around their interpretation.
>Then it is a golden rush to hermeneutics, on the right and on the left,
>usually accompanied by a thorough dose of falsification of the texts
>themselves.
>
>Shortly thereafter, one of the congregations becomes a church with
>universalistic aspirations, and the thought of the philosopher - even
>when it might well have constituted an anti-philosophy - is enshrined by
>an overcode, providing the only legal interpretation of the texts.  If
>the original thought formed an open system, it now becomes closed - and
>closure is thereby sought for any outstanding controversies.   Gathered
>around a dead text wrapping the mummy of the philosopher, believers seek
>their identity.  And finally, sometime after the inevitable failure of
>the ecclesiastic systematization, the residues are left to the hyenas,
>the carrion, the curious, the bookworms and the exegeticists.
>
>One might idly suppose that such fate parallels the course of life.
>Yet, all it parallels is the recourse to survival - with the endless
>compromises that must be made to neutralize, 'atavicize', banalize,
>reduce and disinfect the power of the original thought.  What survives
>of the original impulse is a cadaveric appearance, a deformed parody of
>the philosopher's expression: the commonplaces, the easy
>interpretations, the Campbell-soup version for edentulous puppies.  That
>is the exchange value corresponding to the wide dissemination of a
>label, the price to convert the mediocre to any church.
>
>
>Lambda C
>
>
> --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>
"After death the teachers of error are excluded from the eternal bliss of
the text-book and cast into the purgatorial fires of footnotes, whence,
purged by the intercession of the believer, they ascend into the paradise of
the paragraphs." - Spengler

John T. Duryea



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