Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 22:15:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: VS: Plato/Marx/Nation Socialism



On Wed, 19 Jul 2000 zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:

> Naziism from the Enlightenment? I think those two are about as far away from
> each other as possible. I see Naziism as having arisen from Romanticism.
> Enlightenment thinking was rooted in Reason, Naziism, by their own
> admission, in irrationality.

I have, to this point, stayed clear of this discussion because I have a
huge project and the summer research/writing time is too brief, and this
cluster of topics holds such intense interest for me that I fear entering
the discussion would become consuming.

However, I feel compelled to say, at least, that I do not know where Troy
Camplin learned his intellectual history, but his teachers were, at a
minimum, embalmed specimens in the professoriat. That brief thumbnail
sketch of the cultural heritage of the Nazis creates a geneology of
fascism which turns on several key oppositions:

Enlightenment and Romanticism
Reason and irrationality
Nietzshe and Marx
materialism and (idealism -- suppressed term which is there by
    implication).
fascism and communism (holdovers from earlier postings)

Every one of these terms by themselves and in combination with all the
rest have been the subject of intense research and argument for well over
thirty years in several allied fields (politics, intellectual history,
literary criticism, philosophy) and no self-respecting intellectual or
professionally accountable instructor could ignore the debate. 

So, to see the intellectual landscape be painted in such bold strokes
which (a)  ignores the debates over the both the character and the
relations of those historical movements and ideas and which, furthermore,
(b) calls up a very old and discredited picture, one is simply amazed.  I
suspect that the tone of outrage which has characterized some of the
postings in the last few days stems from the "scandal" of seeing a
historial model which everyone -- at least I -- thought was well-dead.

Troy:  I mean no disrespect, but your picture of the intellectual
landscape is not widely shared, and the few people who do advocate it have
deserved reputations, as some of your interlocutors have said, for
grinding large ideological axes.  You have said you are an apprentice
scholar, and unless you are a stalking horse for Alan Sokal and pulling
the leg of everyone on this list, I recommend some long nights of reading
in the library.  If that prospect interests you I am sure everyone on the
list can recommend some salient texts which reframe the terms of
discussion.

David Langston



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